Introduction

This is the home page for CS697. This course covers a series of design principles and implementation techniques for object-oriented concurrent and distributed systems. Students will design and implement several representative concurrent distributed systems such as web browsers, web servers, instant messaging systems, peer-to-peer overlay systems and distributed event notification systems.

Course Topics

• Object-oriented concurrent systems
  • Processes and threads
  • Scheduling algorithms
  • Java threads
  • Threads and memory management
  • Java bytecode and user stack management
  • Race condition and deadlock
  • Concurrency principles and techniques
    • Mutex, semaphore, barrier, spin lock, double-checked locking, thread pooling, etc.
  • Programming idioms and design patterns for threading
    • Concurrent and distributed variations of regular design patterns such as singleton, observer and command
    • Thread-specific storage, active object and content caching, resource exchanger, etc.

• Object-oriented distributed systems
  • TCP and UDP
  • Socket interface
  • Java sockets
  • Programming idioms and design patterns for socket handling
    • Acceptor/connector, Thread-per-connection, server-side scripting, content caching, half sync/half asynch, asynch completion token
  • Java I/O and NIO
  • Programming idioms and design patterns for I/O handling
    • Reactor, proactor, connection pooling, staged event-driven architecture (SEDA), etc.
  • Distributed event monitoring/notification
  • Middleware for distributed object programming
  • Middleware for mobile code (agents)
  • Middleware for web services

Course Schedule and Homework Dues

Stay tuned on the schedule page.

Paper Readings

1. S. Haldar and D. K. Subramanian, "Fairness in Processor Scheduling in Time Sharing Systems," In ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Vol. 25, Issue 1, January 1991.
2. E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson and J. Vlissides, "The Strategy Design Pattern," In Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Addison Wesley, 1995.
3. E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson and J. Vlissides, "The Proxy Design Pattern," In Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Addison Wesley, 1995.
4. E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson and J. Vlissides, "The Mediator Design Pattern," In Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Addison Wesley, 1995.
5. H. Sutter and J. Larus, Software and the Concurrency Revolution, In ACM Queue vol. 3, no. 7, September 2005.
6. H. Sutter, The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software In Dr. Dobb's Journal, 30(3), March 2005.

7. C. Waldspurger and William Weihl, "Lottery Scheduling: Flexible Proportional-Share Resource Management," In Proceedings of the 1st USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, November 1994.
8. C. Waldspurger and W. Weihl, "Stride Scheduling: Deterministic Proportional-Share Resource Management," Technical Report MIT/LCS/TM-528, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, June 1995.
9. A. Arpaci-Dusseau and D. Culler, Extending Proportional-Share Scheduling to a Network of Workstations In Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications, June 1997.
10. D. Ashvin Goel, J. Gruenberg, D. McNamee, C. Pu and Jonathan Walpole, "A feedback-driven proportion allocator for real-rate scheduling," In Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, February 1999.
11. D. Sullivan, R. Haas and M. Seltzer, "Tickets and currencies revisited: Extensions to multi-resource lottery scheduling," In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, March 1999.
12. Y. Etsion, D. Tsafrir and D. Feitelson, "Process Prioritization Using Output Production: Scheduling for Multimedia," In ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications Volume 2 , Issue 4, November 2006.
13. J. Roberson, "ULE: A Modern Scheduler For FreeBSD," In Proceedings of the 2003 BSD Conference, 2003.
14. T. Newhouse, "ALPS: An Application-Level Proportional-Share Scheduler," In Proceeedings of the 15th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, June 2006.
15. S. Ramabhadran and J. Pasquale, "Stratified Round Robin: A Low Complexity Packet Scheduler with Bandwidth Fairness and Bounded Delay," In ACM SIGCOMM, 2003.
16. A. Arpaci-Dusseau and D. Culler, "Extending Proportional-Share Scheduling to a Network of Workstations," In Proc. of International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications, 1997.
17. D. Petrou, et al., "Implementing Lottery Scheduling: Matching the Specializations in Traditional Schedulers," In Proceedings of USENIX Annual Technical Conference

    Projects

    Office Hours

    S-3-168
    T Th 5:30pm-7pm

    Grading

    The grades for CS697 will be based on homework (40%), project deliverables (40%) and student presentations (20%).

    Accommodations

    Section 504 of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 offers guidelines for curriculum modifications and adaptations for students with documented disabilities. If applicable, students may obtain adaptation recommendations from the Ross Center for Disability Services, M-1-401, (617-287-7430). The student must present these recommendations and discuss them with each professor within a reasonable period, preferably by the end of Drop/Add period.

    Student Conduct

    Students are required to adhere to the University Policy on Academic Standards and Cheating, to the University Statement on Plagiarism and the Documentation of Written Work, and to the Code of Student Conduct as delineated in the catalog of Undergraduate Programs, pp. 44-45, and 48-52. The Code is available online at http://www.umb.edu/student_services/student_rights/code_conduct.html.