Systems Seminar Fall 2005: Great Works

This semester the systems seminar will focus on reading and understanding classic systems papers, ranging from architecture to databases to compilers (and more!) The purposes are threefold:

To broaden our knowledge of systems-related topics and papers, and of the kinds of issues our colleagues think about. We will have a mix of highly influential papers and current ones, with a goal of making the material accessible to all participants.
To give students a chance to present important work from their own research area to a broad audience.
To fatten the students through free catered lunches, so that they will be ripe for the cooking and eating later.

Wait...scratch that last one. The purposes are twofold.

Papers

SYSTEMS DESIGN/PHILOSOPHY

Butler W. Lampson. Hints for Computer System Design. ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 17(5), 33-48, October 1983.
Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David D. Clark. End-to-end arguments in system design. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2, 4 (November 1984) pages 277-288.
Jim Gray and Goetz Graefe. The five-minute rule ten years later, and other computer storage rules of thumb. CoRR cs.DB/9809005: (1998).

MULTIPROCESSING/MULTITHREADING

D. M. Tullsen, S. J. Eggers, and H. M. Levy. Simultaneous multithreading: maximizing on-chip parallelism . ISCA 1995.
D. Lenoski, J. Laudon, K. Gharachorloo, W.-D. Weber, A. Gupta, J. L. Hennessy, M. Horowitz, M. S. Lam. The Stanford Dash multiprocessor. IEEE Computer 25(3) March 1992.

CONCURRENCY AND SYNCHRONIZATION

J. K. Ousterhout. Why threads are a bad idea (for most purposes). Invited USENIX talk, 1996.
Rob von Behren and Jeremy Condit and Eric Brewer. Why events are a bad idea (for high-concurrency servers). HotOS 2003.
tbd

COMMUNICATION

tbd -- CSP?

DISKS

D. A. Patterson, G. Gibson, and R. H. Katz. A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID). SIGMOD 1988.

FILE SYSTEMS

J. Howard, M. Kazar, S. Menees, D. Nichols, M. Satyanarayanan, R. Sidebotham, and M. West. Scale and performance in a distributed file system. ACM Trans. on Computer Systems, 6(1):51--81, February 1988.
M. Rosenblum and J. K. Ousterhout. The design and implementation of a log-structured file system. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 10(10):26-52, 1992.
S. Ghemawat, H. Gobioff, and S.-T. Leung. The Google file system. SOSP 2003.

OPERATING SYSTEMS

H.C. Lauer and R.M. Needham. On the duality of operating systems structures. SOSP 1978.

COMPILERS

F. Chow, J. Hennessey, and L. Weber. The MIPS Compiler. Unpublished.
C. Chambers and D. Ungar. Customization: optimizing compiler technology for SELF, a dynamically-typed object-oriented programming language. PLDI 1989.
H.-J. Boehm. Space Efficient Conservative Garbage Collection. PLDI 1993.

DATABASE SYSTEMS

S. Chaudhuri. An overview of query optimization in relational systems. Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (SPDS) 1998.
E. F. Codd. A relational model of data for large shared data banks. Commun. ACM 13(6): 377-387 (1970).
Morton M. Astrahan, Mike W. Blasgen, Donald D. Chamberlin, Kapali P. Eswaran, Jim Gray, Patricia P. Griffiths, W. Frank King III, Raymond A. Lorie, Paul R. McJones, James W. Mehl, Gianfranco R. Putzolu, Irving L. Traiger, Bradford W. Wade, Vera Watson. System R: relational approach to database management. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 1(2): 97-137 (1976). [excerpts only]

SECURITY

K. Thompson. Reflections on trusting trust. 1983 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM.
B. Lampson. A note on the confinement problem. Operating Systems, 1973.
Peter G. Neumann, L. Robinson, Karl N. Levitt, R. S. Boyer, and A. R. Saxena. A provably secure operating system. M79-225, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (June 1975).
B. Lampson. Protection. Fifth Princeton Symposium on Information Sciences and Systems, Princeton University, March 1971, pp. 437-443, reprinted in Operating Systems Review, Jan. 1974, pp. 18-24.

MISCELLANEOUS

Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder. The protection of information in computer systems. 1975.