Mission and Syllabus // Assignments and grades // Textbook and readings // Class meetings // Staff // Office hours // Hot News // Current Assignment // Projects // Reading Responses // FAQ // Different // Acknowledgments

Mission and Syllabus

Prereq.: CS31a and knowledge of C.

Even if you have no intention to build systems for living after graduation, you may still need to plan a web site, roll out a financial aplication, or advise management on IT strategy. So you need to understand systems. CS146a will teach you the design principles underlying computer software and hardware systems: techniques for controlling complexity; networks and distributed systems; atomicity and coordination of parallel activities; recovery and reliability; privacy of information; impact of computer systems on society. The emphasis will be on long-lasting ideas rather than low-level mechanics. The lectures will define the concepts. The case studies of working systems and outside reading in the current literature will provide comparisons and contrasts. The hands-on assignments will poke at real systems from outside, the lab will provide experience with building systems from inside. Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to understand a computer system and evaluate its key aspects with respect to performance, reliability and security. In addition, the students will gain proficiency in reading and analysing profesional literature, and gain experience in applying in practice some of the design principles learned in class. Here is a detailed CS146a mission and syllabus.  

Assignments and Grades

Grades in cs146a will be based on written reports, lab projects, quizzes and your participation in class. There will not be a final examination.

Before each class, you will be asked to submit a short report pertaining to the reading assignments. Your report will be made available to the class.

The lab will consist of several projects. All the programming will be done in C so fluency in C (or C++) is a must. The lab will be run in Unix environment. You will have to defend your projects.

Since an important part of cs146a is discussion of current literature, your class participation will influence your grade significantly -- so significantly that we hesitate to try to assign weights to the individual components such as summaries and projects. Everything is important; We will assign your final grade based on the personal assessment of what you got out of the course, integrating all the methods of evaluation we can think of.

Collaboration is neither permitted on the reports nor on the projects except collaboration with team members on a team project. You are responsible for protecting your homework directories so that others cannot view them or copy them. Failure to do so constitutes a violation of academic integrity. To protect a unix directory called "homework", "chmod og-rwx homework".

Textbook and readings

There are three things you need to have in order to accomplish the reading assignments in cs146a

• We will use a new operating systems book Principles of Computer System Design, by Jerome H. Saltzer and M. Frans Kaashoek, Morgan Kaufmann, 2009 (ISBN 978-0-12-374957-4) and a set of notes that will be distributed. Background material appears in Modern Operating Systems, by Andrew Tannenbaum, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall Publishers (ISBN: 0130313580) and in Brooks, Frederick P. The Mythical Man-Month, Addison-Wesley, 1975. (ISBN 0-201-00650-2, paperback)
• Readings for cs146a, a set of papers that will be distributed during the semester.

Class meetings

 

Class	Mon, Wed 3:30pm-4:50pm	Volen Rm 101
Tentative Schedule

Staff

 

Lecturer
Liuba Shrira	Volen-133	x62704	(liuba at cs.brandeis.edu)
Teaching Assistant
Ross Shaull	Volen-111	x62746	(rshaull at cs.brandeis.edu)

Office hours

Liuba Shrira : TBD, flexible, send me e-mail to schedule

Ross Shaull : Monday 1:30pm–3:30pm, and by appointment

Hot News

• None yet

Submitting via LATTE

All homework should be submitted via LATTE. You will see the page for 146a in LATTE once you register for the course. If you have any questions about submitting assignments, please contact the TA via email.

Reading Assignments

• Assignment 1, September 8 through September 14, 2011
• Assignment 2, September 15 through September 21, 2011
• Assignment 3, September 22 through September 29, 2011
• Assignment 4, September 29 through October 5, 2011
• Assignment 5, October 6 through October 17, 2011
• Assignment 6, October 20 through October 28, 2011
• Assignment 7, October 26 through November 2, 2011
• Assignment 8, November 3 through November 10, 2011
• Assignment 9, November 10 through November 16, 2011
• Assignment 10, November 17 through December 12, 2011

Programming Projects

• Project 1
• Project 2
• Project 3 (extra credit)

Reading responses from students are posted on the LATTE page for this course.

Help Pages

• Getting Prezi
• Linking to a Prezi

Tutorials

• Visit the tutorials page

FAQ

• FAQ (includes submission instructions)

Students with Disabilities:

And Now For Something Completely Different

Random collection of articles on hot and/or controversial issues related to 146a topics by experts from all over the web. Beware: you may or may not need more then one grain of salt for each grain of truth here.

• David Isenberg On Network Architecture
• Jim Waldo against RPC
• UNIX-Haters against X windows
• From Worse is Better to Bazaar
• Software Engineering Code of Ethics against Therac25
• The Real History of the Internet
• Predicting Technology and Other Curves

Acknowledgments

Last updated 8/13/09