Operating Systems for New (Computer) Architectures (SONAR)

Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Computer Architecture Department
Fall 2004

Basic Information

When: Monday and Wednesday, 3 pm to 4 pm
Where: C6E101
Who: Marisa Gil (marisa at ac.upc.es , D6-215) and Nacho Navarro (nacho at ac.upc.es, D6-212)
Office Hours: Marisa: Monday to Wednesday, 10-12 -Monday, 16-17:30 and Nacho: xxx-xxx (and always by appoinment if need be)

Course Description

The course goal is giving a vision of the developments and research in multiprocessor operating systems, presenting the most important aspects of their design. It is focused on the operating environment structure, user and kernel abstractions and the related programming models. We study policies and mechanisms on resource scheduling (processors, threads, memory, devices), synchronization and communication among threads, parallel applications support and the performance evaluation of the system components. We analyze the support needs in the operating environment due to new proposals on computer architectures.


Quick Links

- Course Collaborative Space (BSCW)

Readings

You will have three basic responsibilities for the readings covered in the course:
  1. - Read the assigned papers before due time. Without doing so, discussion is a little more difficult.
  2. - Form a discussion group. You should have about two to four people in your group, and discuss each paper sometime before class meets. When you have formed a group, please send us an email with a list of group members.
  3. - Write a review of each paper. Your individual write-up should consist of a short-summary and the answer to the question(s) posed. The summary should not exceed half of a page in length. The default list of questions to answer is the Reviewers Form. Turn in your review via BSCW before due time, with the paper title and group member names in the description of the posted document. Write-ups should be in plain text, html or pdf format.
Readings will probably be heavy up front, so make sure not to fall behind. That way, you will have more time towards to end of the semester to focus on your project.

First weeks readings

The first weeks reading includes both guidelines intended to help students efficiently read papers (the brochure "Efficient reading of papers in Science and Technology" by Michael J. Hanson, 1990, revised 2000 Dylan McNamee) and a couple of papers on how to be a good referee and what issues are important when a program committee has to select a paper for publication. Read the brochure first.

Required reading:
Auxiliary reading:

Project

The final project is an important part of the course. You are expected to perform work which could eventually be suitable for publication in a major operating systems conference. In general, people should work in groups of size one or two -- We will not allow groups larger than that. We will provide some suggestions for you to pick from, although you are encouraged to think of a project on your own, which we can help to refine. Project write-ups will be similar in format to a conference submission, and all will be entered into a class-wide mini-conference.

Slides

  1. Introduction