CS702: Advanced Topics in Operating Systems

New (Course Paper/Project Info)

20% Class Participation

20% Paper Summaries

60% Class Paper / Project (likely 5-7 pages)

Objectives : An in-depth study of advanced research topics in operating systems.
Content : Some of the areas covered by this course include: support for multiple processors and cores, interaction with devices, support for high-performance server applications, file systems, and the interaction with and support for virtual machines. There will be an emphasis on application and operating system performance and on experimental research. The study material consists of a selected list of mostly contemporary research papers. In this course we will explore the relationship and boundaries between high-performance applications and their underlying software systems, with an emphasis on the operating system. We will study the design and implementation of a few applications that place significant load on the underlying software infrastructures. One goal of the course will be to contemplate the design and evaluation of new methods for interacting with existing software and infrastructures. We are particularly interested in new interfaces and mechanisms that can be provided by the operating system to significantly improve application performance and scalability.
Required prior knowledge : operating systems, networking, some computer architecture
URL : http:///cs.uwaterloo.ca/~brecht/courses/epfl/