Fall 2021
UC Berkeley
A graduate survey of systems managing computation and information. Topics include volatile and persistent memory management, system support for networking, security infrastructure, extensible systems, APIs, and large software system performance analysis. Students are expected to engage in quality systems research, culminating in a publishable group project.
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.
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.
CS 162, or equivalent.
No data.
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.
General information: ISBN-10: 0-262-69314-3, ISBN-13: 978-0-262-69314-1
Link to MIT press site: Readings in Database Systems, 4th Edition