CSE 221: Final Project

Your project will survey the major research results and directions of a particular systems reseach area (see below for suggestions). You will need to identify the area, propose a set of 6-8 papers for that area, read the papers, and write a 6-8 page report. The report should describe the area, classify and synthesize the approaches and techniques, distinguish contributions made by the various research projects described in the papers, and hypothesize about potential future research directions. The report should demonstrate critical thinking about the work covered in the area, not just regurgitate the material in the papers read.

2. Implementation

Your project will focus on implementating an artifact or experimentally evaluating a system (see below for suggestions). You will need to propose an implementation or evaluation project, and write a 6-8 page report. The report should summarize previous work, state the problem you are investigating, and then describe the implementation or set of experiments you performed. If you performed experiments, you should clearly describe your experimental methodology and the results of your experiments.

Proposal: 11/10 at 23:59 (midnight)

• Write a 1-2 page ASCII project proposal based upon initial feedback from us. Include group member names and emails, project topic and type. State project goals, list of references, and a TODO list for both before and after the project checkpoint.
• Email to professor and TA by midnight on Monday, 11/10.

Checkpoint: 11/21 at 23:59 (midnight)

• Write a 2-3 page ASCII progress report. Address progress on your TODO list from your proposal.
• Email to both the professor and the TA by midnight on Friday, 11/21.

Reports due: 12/9 at 11:30am (at the presentations) (Savage), 12/10 at 12:00 (noon) (Voelker)

• Project reports should be 6-8 pages (including references), single-spaced, single or double column, 11pt font (no smaller, no larger).
• Email a PDF or PS version of your report to both the professor and the TA by noon on Wednesday, 12/10. Place two hardcopies of the report under the professor's door (AP&M 5131 (Voelker), AP&M 5220 (Savage)).

Presentations: Tue 12/9 at 11:30am in WLH 2204 (Savage), Fri 12/12 at 8am in WLH 2112 (Voelker)

• Each group will briefly present their project during the final exam period.

Project Topics

1. Threads vs. Events. A long-standing debate in operating systems is the use of threads versus events to architect and structure high-performance servers. As a contemporary example of this, Matt Welsh (now at Harvard) demonstrated in his thesis that an event-based architecture for high-performance Internet services scales and performs better than those using a thread architecture. Interestingly, Eric Brewer, Matt's thesis advisor at Berkeley, and his student Rob von Behren just published a paper in this year's SOSP that demonstrates that a thread architecture scales better for Internet services.

   Read and digest the published work on this topic, starting with Welsh's and von Behren's work and progressing backwards through referenced work. Synthesize and summarize the arguments on this topic in your report. Explain how researchers could arrive at seemingly contradictory conclusions. Take a stand, and compellingly argue one side. Can future work end this debate once and for all?

   "SEDA: An Architecture for Well-Conditioned, Scalable Internet Services." Matt Welsh, David Culler, and Eric Brewer. SOSP 2001, October, 2001.

   "Capriccio: Scalable Threads for Internet Services." Rob von Behren, Jeremy Condit, Feng Zhou, George C. Necula, Eric Brewer. SOSP 2003, October 2003.

2. New Directions in Protection. An old topic that is receiving new attention is protection. Much of this attention is due to issues in the use and control of digital media rights. Efforts are underway, such as the Palladium effort at Intel, to provide additional hardware for implementing additional protection and security features.

   Read and digest published work on this topic, starting with the XOMOS paper referenced below as well as tracking down information on Palladium. Survey these efforts, compare and contrast the new protection and security goals with more traditional goals that we have read and discussed in this course, and describe how operating systems need to change to take advantage of this new hardware. If this hardware becomes prevalent, how will it change the face of computing?

   "Implementing an Untrusted Operating System on Trusted Hardware" David Lie, Chandramohan A. Thekkath, Mark Horowitz. SOSP 2003.

Finally, below is a list of suggested topics that have appeared recently in the OS literature. These are only suggestions; if there is another topic that you are particularly interested in, then I encourage you to pursue that topic.

• Operating system support for mobile computing
• Operating system support for clusters, cluster-based systems
• Object mobility, mobile agents
• Virtual machines
• Scalable Web servers, Web caches
• Scalable file systems, high-performance file systems, storage area networks
• Wide-area distributed systems
• Peer-to-peer networks and systems
• System and cluster profiling and performance techniques

Implementation Projects