CS262-B: Advanced Topics in Computer Systems

(officially CS294-5)

Joe Hellerstein and Eric Brewer, Spring, 2001

Announcement:
Final presentations will be held 2-5 PM Monday in 310 Soda. Refreshments will be served. If you can put your powerpoint on the web or a floppy, that would be simplest. If you must run a demo, come a bit early so we can set up your laptop.

[Notes from CS262,Fall 2000]

CS262-B is the second semester of a year-long sequence on computer systems research, including operating systems, database systems, and internet infrastructure systems. The goal of the course is to cover abroad array of research topics in computer systems, and to engage you in systems research.

The second semester is devoted to advanced research themes in computer systems:

Extensibility for performance, policy control and enhanced functionality. Research issues include protection, scheduling, safety, accounting, optimization and indexing in face of object encapsulation.
Transactions and Data Structures, separating physical consistency from logical consistency.
Parallelism, including architectures, memory management, data partitioning, scheduling and query optimization.
Wide-Area Distribution, including distributed transactions, disconnected operation, caching, and query optimization.
Scalability, Availability and Consistency, allowing tradeoffs between these issues.
Recent topics of interest, including perhaps the exploitation of language ideas in OSes, and scalable data analysis.

The class is based on a discussion of important research papers, and a research project. Homework may also be assigned.

Prerequisites

CS262A is a prerequisite for this course. If you have taken CS262 and CS286 in years before 1999, you may not be eligible to enroll for CS262-B; please email an instructor for more information.

Exams, Papers, Homework, etc.

The main work of this class is to read steadily, while working toward a group research project of publishable quality. Each student will be individually responsible for writing up a short summary ofevery paper. There may also be one homework assignment.

Research projects are a critical aspect of the course. The goal is to do some quality systems research; that is, to add to our understanding of how to build software systems. Research projects must be written up in a term paper, and will be presented in a poster in a departmental mini-conference. In some cases, it may be appropriate to extend your project from CS262A,in others it would be better to pick a new project. Please contact Prof. Brewer or Hellerstein for guidance on projects.

Readings

There is one required textbook, which should be available at ASUC (and onthe web). It is Readings in Database Systems. We will read and discuss 2-4 papers per week. Many of the papers for the class will be available either on-line, or as handouts in a previous class. An additional suggested test is Gray and Reuter's Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques


Th 1/18	Stats Intro
M 1/22	Application Performance and Flexibility on Exokernel Systems Kaashoek et al.
Th 1/25	[Nemesis:]The Design and Implementation of an Operating System to Support DistributedMultimedia Applications Leslie et al.
M 1/29	Inclusion of New Types in Relational Data Base Systems Stonebraker (in red book) The POSTGRES Next-Generation Database Management System Stonebraker and Kemnitz (in red book)
Th 2/1	Extensibility,Safety and Performance in the SPIN Operating System Bershad et al.
M 2/5	Of Objects and Databases: A Decade of Turmoil DeWitt and Carey The ObjectStore Database System Lamb, Landis, Orenstein and Weinreb (in red book)
Th 2/8	QuickStore: A High Peformance Mapped Object Store White and DeWitt (in Red Book) R-Trees: A Dynamic Index Structure for Spatial Searching Guttman (in Red Book)
M 2/12	Generalized Search Trees for Database Systems Hellerstein, Naughton and Pfeffer (in Red Book) Efficient Locking for Concurrent Operations in B-tree Lehman/Yao (in Red Book) Concurrency and Recovery in Generalized Search Trees Kornacker, Mohan and Hellerstein
Th 2/15	Database Machines: An Idea Whose Time has Passed? Boral & DeWitt (to be passed out in class) The Gamma Database Machine Project DeWitt, et al. (in Red Book) Optional: Parallel Database Systems: The Future of High Performance Database Systems DeWitt & Gray
M 2/19	Presidents' Day, holiday
Th 2/22	The CM-5 Connection Machine: A Scalable Supercomputer Hillis and Tucker How to Get Good Peformance from the CM-5 Data Network Brewer and Kuszmaul
M 2/26	Parallel DB, cont.
Th 3/1	The MIT Alewife Machine: Architecture and Performance Agarwal, et al. Synchronization and Communication in the T3E Multiprocessor Steven Scott
M 3/5	The Case for Networks of Workstations Anderson, et al.
Th 3/8	Optimization of Parallel Query Execution Plans in XPRS Hong & Stonebraker (passed out in class) Parallel Query Scheduling and Optimization with Time- and Space-Shared Resources Garofalakis & Ioannidis
M 3/12	Cluster-Based Scalable Network Services A. Fox, et al.
M 3/19	Lessons from Giant-Scale Services Eric Brewer
Th 3/22	Disconnected Operation in the Coda File System Kistler and Satyanarayanan [PDF Version]
M 4/2	Flexible Update Propagation for Weakly Consistent Replication Petersen, et al.
Th 4/5	*R: An Overview of the Architecture. Williams, et al. (in red book) R* Optimizer Validation and Performance Evaluation for Distributed Queries** Mackert and Lohman (in red book)
M 4/9	Object and Native Code Thread Mobility Bjarne Steensgard and Eric Jul
Th 4/12	*Transaction Management in the R Distributed Database Management System** Mohan, Lindsay and Obermarck (in red book)
M 4/16	The Dangers of Replication and a Solution Gray, Helland, O'Neil, Shasha (in red book)
Th 4/19	Mariposa: A Wide-Area Distributed Database Stonebraker, et al. (in red book)
M 4/23	An Adaptive Hybrid Server Architecture for Client Caching ODBMSs K. Voruganti, et al.
M 4/30	Informix under CONTROL: Online Query Processing Hellerstein, Avnur, Raman
Th 5/3	Improved Query Performance with Variant Indexes (in Red Book) O'Neil and Quass

Lecture Notes

1/18: Intro Statistics for Performance Analysis
1/22: OS Extensibilility, Exokernel
1/25: Nemesis
1/29: DBMS Extensibility, Postgres
2/1: SPIN
2/5: OODBMSs
2/8: Pointer Swizzling
2/12: GiST & Tree Concurrency/Recovery
2/15: Parallelism Intro (& Gamma Notes)
2/22: CM5
3/1: SMPs -- Alewife and T3E
3/12: Cluster-based network services
4/5: Distributed Databases: Overview and Query Processing
4/9: Emerald heterogeneous migration
4/12: Distributed Transactions in R*
4/19: Mariposa
4/29: CONTROL