I will be available in my office (OHS 303) from 10:30-11:20 on Tuesdays through Fridays, as well as by appointment. Or try your luck: just stop by and see whether my door is open. You may send me electronic mail at max@gustavus.edu or call me at extension 7466. I'll try to put any updates to my office hours on my web page, so check there if in doubt.
Attendance is expected for all lab days. (If you turn in a lab report early, you are excused from the remaining days devoted to that lab.) I will excuse up to two absences per student, for any reason. Use yours wisely. If you exceed this allowance, I may reduce your course grade by one letter grade.
Each student will be responsible for setting up a meeting with me the week before their presentation to go over it with me. (You are welcome to additional consultations as well.) At that meeting, you should also give me three straightforward questions about your reading. I will distribute these to the full class. All class members will email me their answers to these three questions by 10:30am the day of your presentation, as a way of making sure we all have a common starting point. I will look through them and alert you immediately before your presentation if there are any common difficulties you might want to address. No late answers will be accepted for these questions, as their point is to lay the groundwork for the presentation.
I will provide a list of attributes that good presentations have. For each presentation, each student in the audience will be asked to select three of these attributes that were particular strong points, and three that particularly need work. I will summarize this feedback for the presenter. I will also use the same list of attributes to structure my own evaluation of the presentation, which will take place in a face-to-face “debriefing” with the presenter, with the grade generated as a summary of that meeting.
I'm going to ask you to express a preference ranking for the topics, and will try to the extent possible to assign people to topics based on that. I suggest you read the abstracts of the papers to help determine your preferences; you can also take into account the timing of the presentations. I'll need to have you email me the rankings by 10:30am Thursday (September 10).
Each class day that has a reading assignment, you are to send me an email by 10:30am with your preparation assignment for that day. I will look these over in order to shape the class to meet your needs. As additional incentive, they will count for a portion of your class grade, based on how many you submit. No late preparation assignments are accepted, as that would undermine their real purpose.
For classes with a student presentation of a conference paper, the preparation assignment will consist of questions provided by the presenters, as described in the section on presentations.
For all other class days, your assignment is to send me an agenda for that day's class. Is there old business from prior days that you see as needing more time? In the new topics from that day's reading, what are the main points we should cover? What illustrations, programs, or other examples from the book would you like to go over? Are there items for which you would like a different example? Are there topics beyond the reading we ought to cover?
You are to select your own homework problems. Each of the eleven chapters in the textbook ends with exercises, programming projects, and exploration projects. You may submit any of these, subject to the restrictions listed below. If I indicate that your initial solution is inadequate, you can submit a revised version, as many times as are necessary to succeed. For each one you eventually succeed at, you will receive one percentage point toward your course grade, up to a maximum of 22%. Thus, your grade will be maximized if you average two successful problems per chapter. Other than that, the restrictions are as follows:
Any substantive contribution to your solution by another person or taken from a publication should be properly acknowledged in writing. Failure to do so is plagiarism and will necessitate disciplinary action.
The same standards regarding plagiarism apply to team projects as to the work of individuals, except that the author is now the entire team rather than an individual. Anything taken from a source outside the team should be be properly cited.
One additional issue that arises from the team authorship of project reports is that all team members must stand behind all reports bearing their names. All team members have quality assurance responsibility for the entire project. If there is irreconcilable disagreement within the team it is necessary to indicate as much in the report; this can be in the form of a “minority opinion” or “dissenting opinion” section where appropriate.
You are expected to be familiar with the college academic honesty honor code policy and to comply with that policy. If you have any questions about it, please ask.
If you are too sick to complete an assignment on time, you will not be penalized. Simply write “late due to illness” at the top of the assignment, sign your name and hand it in. Other circumstances will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
If you have a learning, psychological, or physical disability for which a reasonable accommodation can be made, I would be happy to refer you to the college's disability services coordinator, and to cooperate in the accommodation process. It is generally best if this can be done as soon as possible.
| Date | Reading | Topic | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9/8 | 1 | Introduction | |
| 9/9 | 2 | Threads | |
| 9/10 | 3.1-3.3 | Scheduling Goals | |
| 9/14 | 3.4-3.7, update | Scheduling Mechanisms | |
| 9/15 | Lab Preview | ||
| 9/16 | Lab 1: Scheduling | ||
| 9/17 | paper 1 | Execution Throttling (Peter) | |
| 9/21 | 4.1-4.3 | Mutual Exclusion | |
| 9/22 | 4.4-4.6 | Other Synchronization Patterns | |
| 9/23 | Lab 1 (continued) | ||
| 9/24 | 4.7-4.9 | Synchronization Pathologies | |
| 9/28 | 5.1-5.2 | Example Applications of Transactions | |
| 9/29 | Lab 1 (continued) | ||
| 9/30 | 5.3-5.4 | Mechanisms for Atomicity and Durability | |
| 10/1 | 5.5-5.6 | Additional Transaction Mechanisms | |
| 10/5 | 6.1-6.2 | Uses for Virtual Memory | |
| 10/6 | No class (attend Nobel Conference) | ||
| 10/7 | No class (attend Nobel Conference) | ||
| 10/8 | Review of chapters 1-5 | HW rewrites (1-5) | |
| 10/12 | Intra-term exam 1 (chapters 1-5) | ||
| 10/13 | 6.3 | Mechanisms for Virtual Memory | |
| 10/14 | 6.4-6.5 | Policies for Virtual Memory | Lab 1 |
| 10/15 | Lab 2 | Lab Preview | |
| 10/19 | Lab 2: Prepaging | ||
| 10/20 | 7.1-7.2 | POSIX Process Management | |
| 10/21 | 7.3-7.6 | Protection | |
| 10/22 | paper 2 | Virtual Machine Page Sharing (Ben) | |
| 10/26 | No class (reading day) | ||
| 10/27 | No class (reading day) | ||
| 10/28 | Lab 2 (continued) | ||
| 10/29 | 8.1-8.3 | POSIX File API | |
| 11/2 | 8.4-8.5.1.1 | Disk Space Allocation | |
| 11/3 | Lab 2 (continued) | ||
| 11/4 | 8.5.1.2-8.6 | Metadata, Directories, and Indexes | |
| 11/5 | 8.7-8.9 | Metadata Integrity | |
| 11/9 | paper 3 | Transactional File Access (Kevin) | Lab 2 |
| 11/10 | Lab 3: File Allocation | ||
| 11/11 | Review | HW rewrites (6-8) | |
| 11/12 | Intra-term exam 2 | ||
| 11/16 | 9.1-9.3.1 | Socket APIs | |
| 11/17 | 9.3.2-9.6 | Networking | |
| 11/18 | Lab 3 (continued) | ||
| 11/19 | paper 4 | A SAN Cluster File System (Gabe) | |
| 11/23 | Lab 3 (continued) | ||
| 11/24 | Lab 3 (continued) | ||
| 11/25 | No class (Thanksgiving) | ||
| 11/26 | No class (Thanksgiving) | ||
| 11/30 | 10.1-10.3 | Messaging and Remote Method Invocation | |
| 12/1 | 10.4-10.5 | Web Services | |
| 12/2 | Lab Preview | Lab 3 | |
| 12/3 | Lab 4: Communication Middleware | ||
| 12/7 | 11.1-11.4 | Security Basics | |
| 12/8 | Lab 4 (continued) | ||
| 12/9 | 11.5-11.8 | More on Security | |
| 12/10 | Lab 4 (continued) | ||
| 12/14 | paper 5 | SSL Warning Effectiveness (Patrick) | |
| 12/15 | Review and evaluation | Lab 4, HW rewrites (9-11) | |