M.I.T. DEPARTMENT OF EECS

6.033 - Computer System Engineering Handout 18 - March 15, 2002

Assignment 4: March 18 through April 7 (Updated Apr 1)

For Lecture: Monday, March 18

Today's lecture is the last lecture on networking. Read Chapter 4, Section F (Shared resources and congestion control) of the 6.033 class notes.

For Recitation: Tuesday, March 19

Read the paper "Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem" (Reading #12). The paper is in your reading package and is also available online.

There is no one-pager due today. Instead, keep working on Design Project #1.

For Lecture: Wednesday, March 20

Today's lecture will begin our discussion of Naming. Read Chapter 5, Section A (Reference in computer systems) and Section B (The design space for naming systems) of the 6.033 class notes.

For Recitation: Thursday, March 21

Read the RFC on The IP Network Address Translator (NAT). If you are curious about RFC, you can read the RFC overview page. Also read Things that NAT's break. The origins of this document are slightly unclear, but we believe that the document has been compiled by Keith Moore (U. Tennesee), who may also be the author of the document. These papers are not available in your reading package.

For background on NAT, you may wish to read:

There is no hands-on assignment this week. Instead, work on your Design Project #1 which is due today in recitation.

System aphorism of the week

The first 80 percent of a project takes 80 percent of the effort. The last 20 percent takes another 80.

For March 25 through 29

Have a great Spring Break!

For Lecture: Monday, April 1

We continue our discussion of Naming in today's lecture. Read Chapter 5, Appendix A (Case study of UNIX persistent object naming), Appendix B (Case study of the Internet domain name system, DNS) and Appendix C (Case study of uniform resource locators, URLs) of the 6.033 class notes.

For Recitation: Tuesday, April 2

For recitation and your one-pager, read the paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" (Reading #13) by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. The paper is in your reading package and is also available online. Address the following question in your one-pager:

Often search engines return a lot of "Junk results" in response to user queries. Google uses several techniques to return highly relevant documents as top results. One such technique sorts the results by Pagerank which the authors claim makes use of the link structure of the web. Explain how the Pagerank function uses the link structure of the web. What is the role of damping factor in the Pagerank calculation. Briefly mention two other techniques that Google uses to achieve the goal of returning precise results. How are these techniques (including Pagerank) used together? Does the quality of result suffer if they are not used together? Justify with examples.
Also read the article "The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine" by Richard Wiggins. This paper is not available in your reading packge.

Updated Apr 1: Google has just posted an even more up-to-date article describing their page ranking system. Read this article for the state of the art.

For Lecture: Wednesday, April 3

This lecture is the first lecture covering security in computer systems. Read Chapter 6, Section A (Introduction to secure systems) and Section B (Cryptography as a building block for secure systems).

For Recitation: Thursday, April 4

Read Steven Lerman, James Bruce and Jerome Saltzer's article on "Teaching Students About Responsible Use of Computers" (Reading #14). The paper is in your reading package. Also read Chapter 6, Appendix A (War Stories: Protection System Failures) of the 6.033 class notes.

Also, do Hands-on #6 on DNS for today.

Go to 6.033 Home Page Questions or Comments: 6.033-tas@mit.edu