| 6.033 - Computer System Engineering
| Handout 24 - Issued April 17, 1998
|
Assignment 9: April 20 - 29
Monday and Tuesday, April 20-21 (Patriot's Day)
If you run into
this
(or
this)
guy, thank him (perhaps by reading
this)! If it hadn't been for him, you wouldn't be having this
brief vacation. Go and participate in the 102nd Boston
Marathon. Afterwards, take a long, hot bath and spend some time on
Design Project 2.
It's due next Thursday, April 30.
For Lecture, Wednesday, April 22 (Modular Transactions)
In preparation for lecture, we recommend you take a look at Tanenbaum,
Chapter 11, Section 4. This section covers transactions, which we will
be studying in detail this week.
For Recitation, Thursday, April 23 (System R) - Drop
Date
Read "The recovery manager of the system R database manager" by
Gray
et al., reading #31. This paper is a heavy duty paper, but contains
important, well-explained information. Pay attention to the
details. Why did the RSS turn out to be so complex? How does shadowing
work? What useful features and functionality does the log provide?
How is consistency and serializability obtained?
For Lecture, Monday, April 27 (Replication and consistency)
No assigned reading for today.
For Recitation, Tuesday, April 28 (Coda)
Read "Disconnected operation in the Coda file system" by
Kistler and
Satyanarayanan, reading #33. This paper looks at issues related to
mobile computers that disconnect and reconnect to a file server. By
the way, everyone who's cool calls Satyanarayanan "Satya."
There is no one-pager for today. Continue to work on design project
2. However, think about this issue while reading the Coda paper:
A system running applications (on top of Coda) which are unaware that they
may become disconnected from their file server(s) violates the
end-to-end argument. Demonstrate that this is the case and then
briefly discuss the main benefit that results from Coda not being end-to-end.
For Lecture, Wednesday, April 29 (Performance)
No assigned reading for today.
System aphorism of the week
An engineer is a person who can
do for a dime what any fool can do for a dollar. (Anonymous)