The reading for today is "Disk system architectures for high performance computing" by Katz et al., reading #30. This paper is another heavy duty paper; read it with care. While reading you might want to ask yourself this question: How will each of RAID 3, 5, and 6 perform for transaction processing and for supercomputer I/O workloads? (Section III of this paper describes these workloads.)
The second design project will be available on today in recitation. Pick it up and form a 3-person team with two other students as soon as possible. All students in a team should have the same recitation instructor, since he/she will be grading your project paper. See the design project 2 handout for more details.
We will hand out example questions for Quiz 2 today. Quiz 2 is next Friday (April 19).
Recitation section on the second lab assignment. It will be in 36-144 from 2-3pm.
No lecture and no assignment. However, this Friday Quiz 2 will happen. You may want to use this time to get prepared for the quiz, or to do the reading for Thursday, April 18.
Second lecture on storage. Read Tanenbaum chapter 4, up to and including section 4.3.
The readings are sections from reading #31, "The design and
implementation of a log-structured file system," written by Rosenblum
and Ousterhout. From reading #31, read sections 1-3 and section 5
through 5.1. As a personal exercise, you can contrast the LFS approach
with the traditional UNIX approach described in lecture and discussed
in Tanenbaum section 4.3, and consider their advantages and
disadvantages.
For Quiz 2, Friday, April 19
Quiz 2 covers all the material from recitation 8 (March 5) through recitation 16 (April 12), specifically networking, naming, and protection and security. This includes lectures 9 through 16. (You may want to refer to the 6.033-at-a-glance handout for a high-level topic review, or glance over the lecture notes.)
Just as before, the quiz is open book and open note. Quiz questions from previous years will be available on Thursday, April 11, and the solutions to those questions will be available on Thursday, April 18. There will be another quiz review on Wednesday, April 17 from 7-9pm in 34-101.
The quiz time is 2-3pm, and there are 3 rooms this time!
Students with last names beginning with A through H should go to 4-270.
Students with last names beginning with I through R should go to 4-370.
Students with last names beginning with S through Z should go to 2-190.
System aphorism of the week
KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
6.033 Handout 21, issued 4/9/96