CS262a:
Advanced Topics in Computer Systems

M/W 10:30-Noon in 310 Soda
CCN: 26794
Prof. Eric Brewer, Fall 2011


Poster Session:  Monday 12/12 Noon-2pm in the 6th floor Atrium of Soda Hall

Paper: Due 12/19 at noon via e-mail.  The paper should be similar in scope and style to the (modern) systems paper we have read. Length should be 8-12 pages with 10 viewed as ideal.  It should include motivation, related work, key ideas or principles, and measurements. 



CS262a is the first semester of a year-long sequence on computer systems research, including operating systems, database systems, and Internet infrastructure systems.  The goal of the course is to cover a broad array of research topics in computer systems, and to engage you in top-flight systems research.  The first semester is devoted to basic thematic issues and underlying techniques in computer systems, while the second semester goes deeper into topics related to scalable, parallel and distributed systems.  The class is based on a discussion of important research papers and a research project.

Prerequisites: The historical prerequisite was to pass an entrance exam in class, which covered undergraduate operating systems material (similar to UCB's CS162). There is no longer an exam. However, if you have not already taken a decent undergrad OS class, you should talk with me before taking this class. The exam had the benefit of "paging in" the undergrad material, which may have been its primary value (since the pass rate was high).

Exams, Papers, etc.

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. 
 
Overall Grading:

Lecture and Reading Schedule

There is no required textbook, but some of the papers are in Readings in Database Systems. We will read and discuss 2-4 papers per week. Likely all of the papers will be available online.

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 e-mailed to cs262profs@db.cs.berkeley.edu. 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.


 Part 1:  Some Classics
M 8/29
Week 1		 The UNIX Time-Sharing System [NEW annotated version] [no summary required]
Dennis M. Richie and Ken Thompson
(New electronic version) 
W 8/31 A History and Evaluation of System R [Annotated version]   [in the "Red Book"]
Donald D. Chamberlin, Morton A. Astrahan, Michael W. Blasgen, James N. Gray, W. Frank King, Bruce G. Lindsay, Raymond Lorie, James W. Mehl, Thomas G. Price, Franco Putzolu, Patricia Griffiths Selinger, Mario Schkolnick, Donald R. Slutz, Irving L. Traiger, Bradford W. Wade and Robert A. Yost

Optional Reading 1: Architecture of a Database System [also in textbook]
Optional Reading 2: The Design and Implementation of Ingres [in Red Book]
Michael Stonebraker, Eugene Wong, Peter Kreps and Gerald Held.
M 9/5
Week 2		 Labor Day Holiday
Part 2: Persistent Storage
W 9/7 A Fast File System for UNIX
McKusick, Joy, Leffler and Fabry
Analysis and Evolution of Journaling File Systems
Optional reading: The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System
Rosenblum and Ousterhout (229K) 
M 9/12
Week 3 		The HP AutoRAID Hierarchical Storage System [My temporary local copy,\ 2-up version]
Wilkes, Golding, Staelin and Sullivan 
W 9/14 ARIES: A Transaction Recovery Method Supporting Fine-Granularity Locking and Partial Rollbacks Using Write-ahead Logging , 2-up version
C. Mohan et al. (in Red Book)
M 9/19
Week 4  		Segment-Based Recovery: Write-ahead Logging Revisited
Sears and Brewer
W 9/21   Lightweight Recoverable Virtual Memory
M. Satyanarayanan, Henry H. Mashburn, Puneet Kumar, David C. Steere, and James J. Kistler
Part 3: Concurrency
M 9/26
Week 5

Joe Hellerstein  		Granularity of Locks and Degrees of Consistency in a Shared Database
Gray et al. (Also in the Red Book)
Concurrency Control in Database Systems
Bernstein and Goodman
Optional reading: Generalized Isolation Levels
Atul Adya, Barbara Liskov, Patrick O'Neil
W 9/28 Experience with Processes and Monitors in Mesa
Butler Lampson and David Redell
M 10/3
Week 6		 SEDA: An Architecture for Well-Conditioned, Scalable Internet Services
Welsh, Culler, Brewer
Optional paper:  Capriccio: Scalable Threads for Internet Services
W 10/5 Concurrency Control Performance Modeling: Alternatives and Implications
Agrawal et al.
M 10/10
Week 7 		 Lottery Scheduling: Flexible Proportional-Share Resource Management
Waldspurger and Weihl
Optional reading: Stride Scheduling: Deterministic Proportional-Share Resource Management
Part 4: Higher-Level Models
W 10/12 Parallel Database Systems: The Future of High Performance Database Systems
Dave DeWitt and Jim Gray
MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
Dean and Ghemawhat.

M 10/17
Week 8

 Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System [all new version!] [in Red Book]
Selinger, Astrahan, Chamberlain, Lorie & Price
Optional reading: Grammar-like Functional Rules for Representing Query Optimization Alternatives
G. Lohman [in Red Book]
W 10/19 Encapsulation of Parallelism
Graefe
Eddies: Continuously Adaptive Query Processing
Ron Avnur and Joe Hellerstein

M  10/24
Week 9

 The Click Modular Router
Kohler, Morris, Chen, Jannotti and Kaashoek

W  10/26

 Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach
Alvaro, Conway, Hellerstein and Marczak
Part 5: Virtual Machines

M 10/31
Week 10 

 Xen and the Art of Virtualization
P. Barham, B. Dragovic, K Fraser, S. Hand, T. Harris, A. Ho, R. Neugebauer, I. Pratt and A. Warfield.
Are Virtual Machine Monitors Microkernels Done Right?
S. Hand, A. Warfield, K. Fraser, E. Kotsovinos, D. Magenheimer.

W 11/2

 Live Migration of Virtual Machines
C. Clark, K. Fraser, S. Hand, J. Hansen, E. Jul, C. Limpach, I. Pratt, A. Warfield
ReVirt: Enabling Intrusion Analysis through Virtual Machine Logging and Replay
G. Dunlap, S. King, S. Cinar, M. Basrai and P. Chen
Part 6: Cloud Computing

M 11/7
Week 11

 Cluster-based Scalable Network Services
Fox, Gribble, Chawathe, Brewer and Gauthier
Optional: Lessons from Giant-Scale Services
Brewer

W 11/9

Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications
Stoica, Morris, Karger, Kaashoek, Balakrishnan
Scalable Distributed Data Structures
Gribble et al.
Part 7: Parallel and Distributed Computing

M 11/14
Week 12

 Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-Value Store

W 11/16

 BigTable
Chang et al.

M 11/21
Week 13

 Paxos Made Simple
Lamport 
No summary required, but please read: two-phase commit
Optional Wikipedia entry on Paxos

W 11/23

 Reflections on Trusting Trust (Ken Thompson's Turing Award Lecture)
No summary required

M 11/28
Week 13

 K42: Building a Complete Operating System [NO SUMMARY REQUIRED]
Krieger et al.
No summary required: The multikernel: a new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems
Part 8: Potpourri

W 11/30

 Speculative Execution in a Distributed File System [NO SUMMARY REQUIRED]
E. B. Nightengale, P. M. Chen and J. Flinn

M 12/5
Week 15 

 Reading Week

W 12/7

 Reading Week

Mon 12/12
Noon-2 pm

 [Tentative] Poster Session, 6th Floor Atrum, Soda Hall, Open to the public

Lecture Notes

11/30: Speculator
11/28: K42
11/21: Paxos
11/16: BigTable
11/14: Dynamo
11/9: DDS, Chord
11/7: Cluster-based services, Giant-scale services
11/2: Virtual Machines, part 2
10/31: Virtual Machines
10/24: Click
10/19: Exchange and Eddies
10:17: Query optimization
10/12: MapReduce, Parallel Databases
10/10: Scheduling
10/5: Concurrency control performance
10/3: Threads and Events
9/28: Monitors and Mesa, MARS rover priority inversion story
9/26: Concurrency Control, Updated notes
9/21: LRVM
9/19: Segment-oriented Recovery
9/14: Aries
9/12: AutoRAID
9/7: File Systems
8/31: System R
8/29: Unix