Instructor: Thu D. Nguyen
Email: tdnguyen@cs.rutgers.edu
Office Hours: Tuesday 4-5pm
Office: CoRE 326

TA: Kien Le
Email: lekien@paul.rutgers.edu
Office Hours: By appointment

Mailing list: dcs_519_f05@rams.rutgers.edu
Posting lecture notes: WebCT (use the calendar tool so that people can easily find notes for a specific lecture)
Discussion: WebCT (use the discussion tool)
Assignment submission: WebCT (use the assignment tool)

Pre-requisites:

• Undergraduate courses in operating systems and architecture
  • In the past, 519 has included a great deal of material taught in 416. This term, while I will review some of the 416 material, this review will be much less extensive. So, you must have learned the basics taught in 416.
• C/C++ and Java.

Books:

• There is no required text for this course. However, if you need to re-familiarize yourself with undergraduate material, some of which I will be reviewing, either of the following would be fine. I will list readings from the Silberschatz-Galvin-Gagne (SGG) book but you can easily find the equivalent material in the Stallings book. (The Tanenbaum book is probably fine too but I haven't looked at that one for a while now.)
  • Operating System Concepts (6th Edition), Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne. ISBN: 0-471-41743-2.
  • Operating Systems (4th Edition), Stallings, ISBN: 013-031-999-6

Taking notes:

• I would like one to two students, depending on class size, to take notes each week and share them with the rest of the class.  Please use Latex.  (Yep, I'm going to insist on Latex!)  Here's a sample from a previous term that you can use as your template.  This template generates the following pdf file.
• You should try to complete the notes within one week of being the scribe.  You should post your notes to the calendar tool in WebCT on the date of the lecture (not the date of your posting).  Please post both a pdf and a gzipped tar file containing your source.  We will perhaps discuss the notes from the previous week at the beginning of each lecture.

Weekly reading reviews:

• Each week, you will be assigned 1 or more research papers.  Please read them before the corresponding lecture so you can participate in the discussion.  Each week, before the lecture, I would like you to submit a short summary (no more than a couple of paragraphs) for each paper assigned for that week  This is to encourage you to actually read and think about the papers before lecture.  Please don't just copy a bunch of text from the paper's abstract or intro.  Use your own words.  Summarize the major contributions of the papers and your reactions, e.g., whether and why you like/dislike the paper, open questions, etc.  Summaries should be posted to the appropriate discussion topic (1 per each paper) on WebCT.

Grading:

10% lecture notes
20% midterm
25% final
35% programming assignments
10% participation

In addition, IT IS MANDATORY for you to submit 75% of the reading summaries BEFORE CLASS.  I will NOT pass you regardless of how well you are doing in other aspects of the course if you do not meet this 75% on-time requirement.

Turning in assignments:

Programming assignments are to be submitted using the assignment tool in webct.  A submission will generate a confirming email to you as well as email to the TA, who will pick up the assignment and grade.  The grade will be posted to webct -- each of you can only view your own grade -- once the TA has finished grading.  If you don't see a grade after 2 weeks, you may contact the TA to ask about when the grading will be completed.

 Since there are no deadlines this term, we don't need to have rules about late handins.  The warning is DON'T FALL BEHIND.  It will be impossible to catch up.

Rules for collaborations:

You are free to talk to your fellow classmates about your assignments. However, you must follow the Gilligan's Island rule. That is, after a joint discussion of an assignment, each student should discard all notes, go do something mind-numbing for an hour (like watching two episodes of Gilligan's Island), and then recreate the solutions. The idea of this policy is to ensure that you fully understand the solutions or ideas that the group came up with.

Later assignments may involve people working in teams. When this is the case, each person must understand all aspects of the assignment.

Last but not least, it is likely that you can find solutions to your assignments on the web. Copying from the web is CHEATING and will be dealt with severely. Needless to say, copying from your classmates is also cheating.