CS 5204 - Fall 2008

CS 5204
Fall, 2008

The readings shown for each topic are required. The references are optional resources for further study.

1. Concurrency
August 26	Topics Course overview (PDF, PPT) Threads (PDF, PPT) Readings The Problem with Threads Scheduler Activations: Effective Kernel Support for the User-Level Management of Parallelism
September 2	Topics Threads vs. Events: (PDF, PPT) Readings Capriccio: Scalable Threads for Internet Services SEDA: An Architecture for Well-Conditioned Scalable Internet Services Events Can Make Sense References Why Threads Are A Bad Idea (for most purposes) - a presentation by John Ousterhout Why Events Area A Bad Idea (for hihg-concurrency servers) Cooperative Task Management without Manual Stack Management
September 9	Topics Language Support in CSP (PDF, PPT) Language Support in C# (PDF, PPT) Readings Communicating Sequential Processes Modern Concurrency Abstractions for C# References
September 16	Topics Pi-Calculus, Part 1 (PDF, PPT) Pi-Calculus, Part 2 (PDF, PPT) Readings The Polyadic Pi-Calculus: A Tutorial An Introduction to the Pi-Calculus References
September 23	Topics Transactional Memory, Part 1 (PDF, PPT) Transactional Memory, Part 2 (PDF, PPT) Readings Transactional Memory - Review Article Transactional Memory: Architectural Support for Lock-Free Data Structures A Qualitative Survey of Modern Software Transactional Memory Systems Software Transactional Memory for Dynamic-Sized Data Structures Language Support for Lightweight Transactions References Transactional Memory Online Using Cache memory to Reduce Processor-Memory Traffic - Goodman's original "snoopy cache" paper.
September 30	Topics Distributed Transactions (PDF, PPT) Readings Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems, Chapter 1 Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems, Chapter 3 (exceprt) References
2. Security
October 7	Topics Access Control Models (PDF, PPT) Cryptographic Security (PDF, PPT) Readings Protection Access Control in Collaborative Systems A Method of Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems References Handbook of Applied Cryptography
October 14	Take Home Midterm Exam (no class meeting this week)
October 21	Topics Authentication (PDF, PPT) Authorization, Part 1 (PDF, PPT) Readings An Introduction to Cryptography An Introduction to XACML A Brief Introduction to XACML References An Introduction to Public-Key Cryptography RFC 2459: Internet X.509 Public-Key Infrastructure XACML Specification (Version 2.0) OASIS home page for XACML
October 28	Topics Authorization, Part 2 (PDF), PPT) A Private Key System (PDF, PPT) Readings Design and Semantics of a Decentralized Authorization Language Kerberos: An Authentication Service for Computer Networks References A Unified Approach to Trust, Delegation, and Authorization in Large-Scale Grids SecPAL: Design and Semantics of a Decentralized Authorization Language SecPAL Home site Kerberos web site
3. Fault Tolerance
November 4	Topics Event Ordering (PDF, PPT) Checkpointing (PDF, PPT) Readings Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System Lightweight Causal and Atomic Group Multicast A Survey of Rollback-Recovery Protocols in Message-Passing Systems
November 11	Topics Global State Recording (PDF, PPT) Commit Algorithms (PDF, PPT) Readings Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global State of a Distributed System Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems, Chapter 7
4. Virtualization and File Systems
November 18	Topics Virtualization, Part 1 (PDF, PPT) Virtualization, Part 2 (PDF, PPT) Readings Xen and the Art of Virtualization Safe Hardware Access with the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server A Comparison of Software and Hardware Techniques for x86 Virtualization Virtualizing I/O Devices on VMware Workstation's Hosted Virtual Machine Monitor Intel Virtualization Technology References The Architecture of Virtual Machines Virtual Machine Monitors: Current Technology and Future Trends Xen web site at Univeristy of Cambridge VMware web site: Virtualization Overview
November 25	Thanksgiving Week Break No class meeting this week
December 2 (no class meeting)	NOTE: We will not meet on this day. In addition to the readings there are three recorded videos on the topics for todays class. Topics Google File System Distributed Storage of Large, Structured Data Readings The Google File System Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data Resources GFS lecture from 2007 and Slides (PDF, PPT) A YouTube video presentation on GFS (approximately 30 minutes) (Note: use the slider control to skip to the start of the GFS presentation at 14:45) A video lecture on Bigtable by Jeff Dean (one of the Bigtable developers) (approximately 1 hour) References
December 9	Topics Paxos (PDF, PPT) Peer-Peer File Systems (PDF, PPT) Readings Paxos Made Simple Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-Peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications Wide -area cooperative storage with CFS References Paxos Made Live - An Engineering Perspective A Survey of Peer-toPeer Storage Techniques for Distributed File Systems A Survey of Peer-to-Peer Systems A Survey of Peer-toPeer Content Distribution Technologies
December 12 - December 15	Take Home Final Exam