CS 262a (Fall 2012): Advanced Topics in Computer Systems

Instructors:
Location:

Catalog Description:

Graduate survey of systems for managing computation and information, covering a breadth of topics: early systems; volatile memory management, including virtual memory and buffer management; persistent memory systems, including both file systems and transactional storage managers; storage metadata, physical vs. logical naming, schemas, process scheduling, threading and concurrency control; system support for networking, including remote procedure calls, transactional RPC, TCP, and active messages; security infrastructure; extensible systems and APIs; performance analysis and engineering of large software systems. Homework assignments, exam, and term paper or project required.

Prerequisites: CS 162, or equivalent.

Expanded Description:

Three hours of lecture per week. The main work of this class is to read frequently and deeply, while working toward a group research project of publishable quality. Each student will be individually responsible for writing up a short summary of every paper. There will be one midterm exam (albeit near the end), and no final exam. Research projects are a critical aspect of the course. Your goal is to do some quality systems research; that is, to add to our understanding of how to build systems. Research projects must be written up in a term paper, and will be presented in a poster in a departmental mini-conference. Suggested project ideas will be provided by the instructors, but you are strongly encouraged to come up with your own project ideas. Potential projects include implementation or analysis of some piece of an OS, a DBMS, or an Internet service; extending one of these systems with new functionality; or measurement and analysis of existing systems with the goal of better understanding issues in system design.

Paper Summaries:

For every assigned paper (except for some explicit exceptions), students must turn in a reading summary before the beginning of the corresponding lecture. Summaries should be submitted on the handouts page. Summaries should be limited to 1/2 page at most and should include at least one criticism of the paper. (Just a simple summary, as you might get from the abstract or conclusion, misses the point, which is to get students to read the papers!) You can miss 3 summaries without penalty.

Course Grading:

50% project paper (work in groups of 2 or 3)
15% project demo
25% midterm
10% paper summaries.

: See also Departmental Grading Guidelines for Graduate courses
Optional Textbook:

Communication:: The course-wide mailing list is cs262@kubi.cs.berkeley.edu. Announcements will be posted both on this web page and to the mailing list.

Last modified 8/22/2018