Advanced Topics in Computer Systems

2019

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Week 1: Reflections on Systems Design

• Hints for Computer Systems Design (Revised), Lampson. 1983. ACM SOSP 1983, pp.33—48.
• The role of motherhood in the pop art of system programming, Neumann. 1969. ACM SOSP 1969, pp.13—18.
• Theory and practice in operating system design, Needham and Hartley. 1969. ACM SOSP 1969, pp.8—12.

Week 2: OS Structure

• Exokernel: an operating system architecture for application-level resource management, Engler et al. 1995. ACM SOSP 1995, pp.251—266.
• The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems, Baumann et al. 2009. ACM SOSP 2009, pp.29—44.
• Unikernels: Library Operating Systems for the Cloud, Madhavapeddy et al. 2013. ACM ASPLOS 2013, pp.461—472.

Additional

• The UNIX time-sharing system, Ritchie and Thompson. 1974. Commun. ACM 17(7):365—375. Revised version of paper appearing at ACM SOSP 1973.

Week 3: Virtualisation

• Xen and the Art of Virtualization, Barham et al. 2003. ACM SOSP 2003, pp.164—177.
• Container-based operating system virtualization: a scalable, high-performance alternative to hypervisors, Soltesz et al. 2007. ACM EuroSys 2007, pp.275—287.
• My VM is Lighter (and Safer) than your Container, Manco et al. 2017. ACM SOSP 2017, pp.218—233.

Additional

• Light-Weight Contexts: An OS Abstraction for Safety and Performance, Litton et al. 2016. USENIX OSDI 2016, pp.49—64.

Week 4: Distributed Consensus

• ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems, Hunt et al. 2010. USENIX ATC 2010.
• In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm, Ongaro and Ousterhout. 2014. USENIX ATC 2014, pp.305—319.
• The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems, Burrows. 2006. USENIX OSDI 2006, pp.335—350.

Additional

• Paxos Made Moderately Complex, van Renesse and Altinbuken. 2015. ACM Comput. Surv. 47(3).

Week 5: Cluster Scheduling

• Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg, Verma et al. 2015. ACM EuroSys 2015.
• Fuxi: a fault-tolerant resource management and job scheduling system at Internet scale, Zhang et al. 2014. Proc. VLDB Endow. 7(13):1393—1404.
• Firmament: Fast, Centralized Cluster Scheduling at Scale, Gog et al. 2016. USENIX OSDI 2016, pp.99—115.

Week 6: Data Intensive Computing

• MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters, Dean and Ghemawat. 2004. USENIX OSDI 2004.
• Dryad: Distributed Data Parallel Programming from Sequential Building Blocks, Isard et al. 2007. ACM EuroSys 2007, pp.59—72.
• Pregel: A System for Large-Scale Graph Processing, Malewicz et al. 2010. ACM SIGMOD 2010, pp.135—146.

Week 7: Privacy

• CryptDB: Protecting Confidentiality with Encrypted Query Processing, Popa et al. 2011. ACM SOSP 2011, pp.85—100.
• GhostRider: A Hardware-Software System for Memory Trace Oblivious Computation Liu et al. 2015. ACM ASPLOS 2015, pp.87—101.
• Ryoan: A Distributed Sandbox for Untrusted Computation on Secret Data, Hunt et al. 2016. USENIX OSDI 2016, pp.533—549.

Additional

• Hails: Protecting Data Privacy in Untrusted Web Applications, Giffin et al. 2012. USENIX OSDI 2012, pp.47—60.
• SCONE: Secure Linux Containers with Intel SGX Arnautov et al. 2016. USENIX OSDI 2016, pp.689—703.

Week 8: Verification

• IronFleet: Proving Practical Distributed Systems Correct, Hawblitzel et al. 2015. ACM SOSP 2015, pp.1—17.
• I4: Incremental Inference of Inductive Invariants for Verification of Distributed Protocols, Ma et al. 2019. ACM SOSP 2019, pp.370—384.
• Scaling symbolic evaluation for automated verification of systems code with Serval, Nelson et al. 2019. ACM SOSP 2019, pp.225—242.