M.I.T. DEPARTMENT OF EECS

6.033 - Computer System Engineering Handout 28 - April 19, 2002

Assignment 6: April 22 through May 5

For Lecture: Monday, April 22nd

Today's lecture will be on Fault Tolerant Computing. Please read Sections A, B and C of Chapter 7 in the course notes.

For Recitation: Tuesday, April 23rd

The topic of this recitation will be fault-tolerant computing. Please read Appendix 7-A and 7-B from the course notes and answer the following question in a one-pager:

After reading the two appendices of Chapter 7, devise a plan for reliably detecting seek errors on writing, and discuss your plan's impact on performance.
Note that the RAID paper was originally scheduled for today, but we have dropped it in favor of appendices 7-A and 7-B.

For Lecture: Wednesday, April 24th

In preparation for this lecture on Transactions, read sections A and B of Chapter 8 of the course notes.

For Recitation: Thursday, April 25th

For recitation, read "The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System" by Rosenblum and Ousterhout (Reading #18).  Please also do Hands-on #8.  In this hands-on assignment you will experiment with some of the same benchmarks used in the LFS paper.

For Lecture: Monday, April 29th

In today's lecture we will continue with Transactions.  Please read section C and D of Chapter 8 of the course notes.

For Recitation: Tuesday, April 30th

Read "The Recovery Manager of the System R Database Manager," by Gray et al. (Reading #21). Chapter 8, Appendix C of the course text provides a helpful guide for understanding System R. For recitation, answer the following question in a one-page paper:

The author concedes that "we should have adopted the IMS-like approach of using the WAL protocol for large shared files. Discuss the advantages/disadvantages of using this protocol. What aspects of the overall system would change? What aspects of the system would no longer be required if WAL was used? Why?

For Lecture: Wednesday, May 1st

In today's lecture we will finish up with Transactions.  Please read section E of Chapter 8 of the course notes.

For Recitation: Thursday, May 2nd

Today we continue our discussion of system R; please, give the paper a second read; it might clarify some issues that might have been confusing on the first read of the paper.  In addition, read two short papers. Read "Chocolate" by Plauger (Reading #20)  and "Engineering: History and Failure" by Petroski (Reading #19). Please also do Hands-on #9 This hands-on assignment will give you some experience using a transaction system.

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)

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