Course Information

Syllabus

The course syllabus is posted here.

Instructor’s office hours (open studio)

• Where: Zoom
• When: Friday 10 - 10:30 am

GTA & office hours

• Yuyang Leng
• Email: yleng2@gmu.edu
• Where: BB Collaborate
• When: Tuesday and Thursday, 5 - 6 pm

Prerequisite

• Grade of C or better in CS 310, CS 367, and CS 465.
• All students MUST be comfortable with programming in the C language. This is a strong requirement.
• Take this Quiz, if you are a graduate student who did your undergradaute study elsewhere and you are not sure if you meet the prerequisites.

Reading

There are no official textbooks. Required readings are (most frequently) in the form of seminal research papers and/or selected textbook chapters of the awesome OSTEP textbook.

If you need a textbook to review and catch background, go get OSTEP, which is an excellent resource for learning OS and is completely free. OSTEP is publicly available at:

• Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (OSTEP), by Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Aug, 2018 (v 1.00)

I also strongly encourage you to discuss the papers with other students in the class — you may have insights that others do not, and vice versa. Oftentimes, students form reading groups, which I encourage; on the other hand, I would like to point out that group discussion is not an effective substitute for actually reading the paper.

Class participation

In addition to textbook concepts that I will cover in the form of lectures, for research papers, we will use a discuss-oriented format. Therefore, class participation is required. We will discuss the papers and articles that we will have all read before each class. I will provide you with a review form that you must complete and submit before the class. I will provide feedback to your paper reviews the night before the class. During the class, I will lead discussions by asking questions of students at random in class. Note that your performance in class form up to 10% of your overall grade, so it does matter that you 1) show up to class AND 2) participate in the discussion (which in fact requires you to read the papers).

Research projects

Provided in class

GitLab rules

Refer to GitLab Setup for detailed instructions on setting up GitLab repos.

Grading policy

Your grade will be calculated as follows:

• 20% three mini-exams
• 10% paper reviews and in-class participation
• 10% project proposal
• 10% project checkpoint report 1
• 10% project checkpoint report 2
• 40% final project report, presentation, artifact eval

Grading rules

The final grade is computed according to the following rules:

• A+: >= 97%; A: [92%, 97%); A-: [87%, 92%)
• B+: [82%, 87%); B: [77%, 82%); B-: [72%, 77%)
• C+: [66%, 72%); C: [63%, 66%); C-: [60%, 63%)
• D+: [50%, 60%)
• F: < 50%