6.033: Computer Systems Engineering
Spring 2005

FAQ

Reading List

Class notes

  • Jerome H. Saltzer and M. Frans Kaashoek. Principles of Computer System Design.  M.I.T. 6.033 class notes, draft release 2.0 (February 2005).

The class notes are a work in progress. Chapters 11 and Problems and Solutions will be handed out during the term. (The class notes will be available  as a separate package.)

Papers

Introduction to computer systems

  1. Richard P. Gabriel. The rise of "Worse is better". On-line version of "Worse is Better", From LISP: good news, bad news, how to win BIG, AI Expert 6, 6 (June, 1991) pages 33-35. 
  2. Herbert A. Simon. The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society106, 6 (December, 1962) pages 467-482. Republished as Part 4, pages 84-118, of The Sciences of the Artificial, MIT Press, 1969. ISBN: 0-262-191051-6 (hardbound) 0-262-69023-3 (paperback). 
  3. George D. Gopen and Judith A. Swan. The science of scientific writing. American Scientist 78, 6 (November-December, 1990) pages 550-558. 
  4. Nancy G. Leveson and Clark S. Turner. An investigation of the Therac-25 accidents. Computer 26, 7 (July, 1993) pages 18-41.

Computer system organization

  1. Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken L. Thompson. The UNIX time-sharing system. Bell System Technical Journal 57, 6, part 2 (1978) pages 1905-1930.
  2. Robert Scheifler and Jim Gettys. The X window system. ACM Transactions on Graphics 5, 2 (April, 1986) pages 79-109. 
  3. Vivek S. Pai, Peter Druschel, and Willy Zwaenepoel. Flash: An efficient and portable Web server. Proc. of 1999 Annual Usenix Technical Conference, Monterey, CA (June, 1999), pages 199-212. 
  4. Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.  MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters, Proc. 6th Symp. on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), San Francisco, CA (December 2004).

Networking

  1. Robert M. Metcalfe and David R. Boggs. Ethernet: Distributed packet switching for local computer networks. Communications of the ACM 19, 7 (July, 1976) pages 395-404. 
  2. J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D.D. Clark. End-to-end arguments in system design. ACM Trans. on Computer Systems 2, 4 (November, 1984), pp. 277-288.
  3. Hari Balakrishnan. An Introduction to Wide-Area Internet Routing. 6.033 case study MIT (January 2004). 
  4. Russell Sandberg, David Goldberg, Steve Kleiman, Dan Walsh, and Bob Lyon. Design and implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem. Proc. of the 1985 Summer Usenix Technical Conference, El Cerrito, CA (June 1985), pp. 119-130.
  5. Geoff Huston, Anatomy: A Look Inside Network Address Translators. The Internet Protocol Journal, 7(3), (September 2004), pages 2-32. 

Failure recovery, coordination, and atomicity

  1. Mendel Rosenblum and John K. Ousterhout. The design and implementation of a log-structured file system. Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Pacific Grove, California (October 13-16, 1991) pages 1-15. Published as Operating Systems Review 25, 5 (1991). Also appeared in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 10, 1 (February, 1992) pages 26-52. 
  2. Henry Petroski. Engineering: History and failure. American Scientist 80, 6 (November-December, 1992) pages 523-526. 
  3. Jim Gray, Paul McJones, Bruce Lindsay, Raymond Lorie, Tom Price, Franco Putzolu, and Irving Traiger. The recovery manager of the System R database manager. ACM Computing Surveys 13, 2 (June, 1981) pages 223-242.
  4. Phillip J. Plauger. Chocolate. Embedded Systems Programming7, 3 (March, 1994) pages 81-84. 

Security

  1. Ken Thompson. Reflections on Trusting Trust. Communications of the ACM 27, 8 (August 1984) pages 761-763.
  2. Ross J. Anderson. Why cryptosystems fail. Proceedings of the 1993 ACM Conference in Computer and Communications Security, (1993) pages 32-40.

More complexity 

  1. Butler W. Lampson. Hints for computer system design.  Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire (October 10-13, 1983), pages 33-48. Published as Operating Systems Review 17, 5 (1983)

 

Questions or comments regarding 6.033? Send e-mail to the 6.033 staff at or to the 6.033 TAs at

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