Fall 2003. Distributed/Multiprocessor Operating Systems.

Class synopsis
- just a brief outline of topics covered in class

No guarantees of accuracy or completeness.

Class 1: Aug 25

• Introduction to the class and course contents
• Distributed Operating Systems
• Multiprocessor architecture (UMA)
• Concurrency in multiprocessor operating systems

Class 2: Aug 27

• Operating Systems Kernels, system calls and interrupts
• Reentrancy in kernels - uniprocessor and multiprocessor
• Making kernels reentrant - preemptible and non-preemptible kernels
• Need atomicity to get atomicity - disable interrupts and test and set
• Making semaphores from atomic constructs

Class 3: Sept 2

• Atomicity revisited
• Mutex Semaphores and Spin Semaphores
• Benefits of each approach, user level usage of mutex/spin semaphores
• "Need atomicity to get Atomicity?"
• Peterson/Dekker solutions
• Processor Classifications: SISD, SIMD, MISD, MIMD
• Multiprocessor classifications: UMA NUMA, NORMA

Class 4: Sept 8

Lecture by Austin Godber on NFS/AFS/SMB and Kerberos

Class 5: Sept 10

• Processors and Processes -- and Programs and Processes
• Processes and Threads
• Sharing of variables (global/local/stack/heap)
• Parallel Processing
• "fork/join" programming
• structured parallel programming (the "parbegin-parend" strategy)
• Operating Systems for the UMA machine (scheduling/reentrancy etc.)

Class 6: Sept 15

• What does the Butterfly/Hypercube look like?
• Programming a Multiprocessor - programs, processes and processors 
• Fork - Join programming and Parbegin - Parend programming
• Barrier Synchronization
• Multiprocessor Scheduling - co-scheduling, affinity scheduling, smart scheduling
• NORMA machines and NORMA Programming
• Splitting up programs for parallel execution

Class 7: Sept 17

• Programming the NORMA - data movement, granularity
• Software packages PVM/MPI/Linda
• Programming using PVM
• Master-worker method
• MPI and scatter gather
• Open MP
• Linda

Class 8: Sept 22

• Introduction to Distributed Systems
• Autonomy and collaboration
• Load balancing, efficiency, reliability
• USAGE: Distributed Application - Info sharing - resource sharing - reliability - flexibility
• Issues - TRANSPARENCY (access/location/replication/failure)
• Distributable System Models (message, RPC, DSM)

Class 9: Sept 24

• History of Distributed Operating Systems
• OS facilities -- timesharing systems to PC's (integration started disappearing)
• Bringing tighter coupling back to networked machines - network file systems (NFS)
• Sun-NFS and how it works
• Mounting file systems, remote mounts, configuring dataless workstations (all data file visible at all workstations)
• Translating local and remote file names to "i-numbers"
• Read client and nfsd interactions

Class 10: Sept 29

• Read and write in NFS
• Stateless design of file service
• Differences with stateless and stateful designs - performance vs. failure tolerance
• Caching (bufferring)
• Scalability issues
• Fully distributed file systems
• The Andrew file system and its design
• Coherence issues
• Locking - advisory vs. mandatory

Class 11: Oct 1

• Distributed Systems and message passing
• Simple message passing system - design (messages, ports)
• Send and receive - blocking and non-blocking
• timeouts are bad
• Writing simple message passing programs

Class 12: Oct 6

• TCP IP by Mujtaba Khambatti

Class 13: Oct 8

• Client Server programming
• Server port naming
• Name service
• Server scalability - use multiple thread or processes
• Server state -- why cannot server code be moved to clients

Class 14: Oct 13

• Server scalability
• Pool of processes or threads
• Dynamic processes or thread
• Multithreaded servers (issues with server state)
• Threads and Processes

Class 15: Oct 15

• Homework #2 assigned
• Pre-emptible and non-pre-emptible threads
• Programming with non-preemptible threads
• User level threads
• Writing a user level threads package (Startthread, P, V and Schedule)

Class XX: Oct 20: MID TERM EXAM

Class 16: Oct 22

• Project-1 Assigned
• Discussion of project - semaphores, shared memory
• Implementing Ports on a single machine using bounded buffer

• Distributed Clocks, lecture by Shu Zhang

Class 18: Oct 29

• Implementing Distributed Ports (multi machine)
• TCP IP ports
• Global Ports - naming, location and send/receive handling
• Network Message Service

Class 19: Nov 3

• Use of cookies in single threaded stateless servers
• Lock management in distributed systems (exclusive locks)

Class 20: Nov 5

• Lock management continued -- upgrading and deadlocks

Class 21: Nov 10

• Unlocking the locks, starvation prevention
• Introduction to RPC

Class 22: Nov 12

• Project 2A
• RPC, IDL and stubs
• How RPC works

Class 23: Nov 17

• Distributed Shared Memory (coherence, semantics, page fault handling, basic algorithm)

Class 24: Nov 19

• Project 2B (final)
• Distributed Shared memory -- implementation
• Drawbacks -- page shuttling, false sharing
• Positives -- locking improves performance, automatic data transfer and caching
• Better solution -- Release Consistent DSM.

Class 25: Nov 24

• The muddy children Problem
• Hierarchies of knowledge
• Common knowledge, attainment
• Consensus
• Coordinated Attack
• Two phase commit
• A paper by Moses et. al.

Class 26: Nov 26

• Time in Distributed Systems and Event ordering
• Lamport Clocks
• Distributed Mutual Exclusion
• Lamports Algorithm
• Paper by Lamport
• Maekawa Algorithm

Class 27: Dec 1

• Distributed Snapshots, the algorithm
• Examples of a simple 2-process message passing system and its snapshots
• Paper by Chandy and Lamport

Class 28: Dec 3

• Distributed Snapshots - properties and informal proof
• Replication of data for availability and reliability.

Class 29: Dec 8: Last class

Demos: In the Dec 9-12 time frame

Final Exam: Mon. Dec 15 4:40-6:30 PM