CS 7934 — Computer Systems Seminar, Fall 2017

Fridays, 2:00–3:30 PM, 3485 MEB

Instructor: Eric Eide

Schedule

Week Date Topic(s) Facilitator(s) Paper(s)
1 8/25 Eide no meeting — organizational email
2 9/1 correct systems Eide An Empirical Study on the Correctness of Formally Verified Distributed Systems. Pedro Fonseca et al. In EuroSys ’17, Apr. 2017.
3 9/8 multicore communication Wong Machine-Aware Atomic Broadcast Trees for Multicores. Stefan Kaestle et al. In OSDI ’16, Nov. 2016.
4 9/15 container deployment Duplyakin Slacker: Fast Distribution with Lazy Docker Containers. Tyler Harter et al. In FAST ’16, Feb. 2016.
5 9/22 configuration checking Johnson Early Detection of Configuration Errors to Reduce Failure Damage. Tianyin Xu et al. In OSDI ’16, Nov. 2016.
6 9/29 hypervisor-level services Hibler Multi-Hypervisor Virtual Machines: Enabling an Ecosystem of Hypervisor-level Services. Kartik Gopalan et al. In ATC ’17, Jul. 2017.
7 10/6 in-memory storage Ricci Rocksteady: Fast Migration for Low-latency In-memory Storage. Chinmay Kulkarni et al. In SOSP ’17, Oct. 2017. To appear.
8 10/13 no meeting — University fall break
9 10/20 no meeting — MobiCom ’17 conference
10 10/27 lightweight virtual machines Grubb My VM Is Lighter (and Safer) Than Your Container. Filipe Manco et al. In SOSP ’17, Oct. 2017. To appear.
11 11/3 mitigating insider threats Naqvi WatchIT: Who Watches Your IT Guy? Noam Shalev et al. In SOSP ’17, Oct. 2017.
12 11/10 gradual typing Hatch The VM Already Knew That: Leveraging Compile-Time Knowledge to Optimize Gradual Typing. Gregor Richards et al. In Proc. ACM on Programming Languages, 1(OOPSLA):55:1–55:27, Oct. 2017.
13 11/17 information flow control Li Making Information Flow Explicit in HiStar. Nickolai Zeldovich et al. In OSDI ’06, Nov. 2006.
(We previously discussed this paper in fall 2006.)
14 11/24 no meeting — Thanksgiving break
15 12/1 SSD performance Duerig The Unwritten Contract of Solid State Drives. Jun He et al. In EuroSys ’17, Apr. 2017.
16 12/8 stream processing Cho Typhoon: An SDN Enhanced Real-Time Big Data Streaming Framework. Junguk Cho et al. In CoNEXT ’17, Dec. 2017. To appear.

Overview

The fall 2017 offering of CS 7934 will cover a variety of systems topics, with an eye toward two goals.

The first is to increase participants' familiarity with recent and important results in the area of computer systems research. Attendees will read and discuss papers from recent and imminent top-tier systems conferences: e.g., SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, SIGCOMM, FAST, systems-related security conferences, and so on. Attendees will typically discuss one paper each week. Papers will be selected for their relevance to participants' research or upcoming Utah visitors. In contrast to some recent offerings of the seminar, there is no preset “focus topic” for fall 2017. One can anticipate, however, that the semester will include discussions about operating systems, distributed systems, cloud computing, datacenters, networking, and security.

The second is to be a venue for student presentations. Every student participating in the seminar will be required to lead at least one meeting during the semester. This may be a “formal” research presentation—ideally of a student's current work—or it may be an analysis of the research papers chosen for a seminar meeting.

CS 7934 is often called “the CSL seminar.” The name CSL is historic.

Mailing list

To get on the class mailing list, use Mailman to subscribe to csl-sem.

Syllabus

The course syllabus contains important information for students, including the course's policies on grading and cheating.

Credit

Students may enroll for one (1) credit.

Those taking the course for credit must read all of the assigned papers, submit a short summary of each assigned paper prior to class (PDF, LaTeX), participate in each discussion, and facilitate at least one seminar meeting during the semester. Refer to the syllabus for further information.

Potential Papers

Upcoming and recent conference proceedings are good sources of papers for discussion. Below are links to some relevant conference series.

Past CSL Seminars

Semester Focus Topic(s)
Spring 2017 no focus topic chosen
Fall 2016 no focus topic chosen; many SIGCOMM ’16 papers
Spring 2016 no focus topic chosen
Fall 2015 no focus topic chosen; many systems security papers
Spring 2015 no focus topic chosen
Fall 2014 no focus topic chosen; many OSDI ’14 papers
Spring 2014 no focus topic chosen; many systems security papers
Fall 2013 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’13 papers
Spring 2013 reversible and “time-traveling” debugging
Fall 2012 modern networking and network management; peer-review process
Spring 2012 systems approaches to dynamic problem detection and repair
Fall 2011 datacenter architectures and issues
Spring 2011 malicious software, i.e., malware
Fall 2010 systems approaches to security
Spring 2010 testbed-like infrastructures for cloud computing and scientific computing
Fall 2009 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’09 papers
Fall 2008 no focus topic chosen; many OSDI ’08 papers
Summer 2008 no focus topic chosen; informal biweekly meetings
Spring 2008 no focus topic chosen
Fall 2007 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’07 papers
Fall 2006 no focus topic chosen; many OSDI ’06 papers
Fall 2005 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’05 papers
Spring 2005 no focus topic chosen; many NSDI ’05 papers

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