Systems and Networks
CS U480

Spring, 2007
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday at 10:30 - 11:35, Room 110 WVH
Final Exam: April 20, 2007, at 1:00

Instructor

John Casey, jcasey@ccs.neu.edu
617 - 373 - 3550

Course Calendar

Click here for the current calendar.

News

Watch here for updates: assignments,etc.

Feb. 6
The machinery for submitting homework #1 is working. Please go to the calendar, then register, then submit your program.

Feb. 6
We're setting up a machinery for submitting the first programming assignment. As soon as it is working, we'll ask you to hand in your program. When we do that, every program wil be on time.

Resources

Java classes documentation

Java Tutorial

A good, and also authoritative book: The Java Programming Language, Fourth Edition.
Ken Arnold, James Gosling, and David Holmes, Addison-Wesley, 2006.

Course Description

Prerequisites

This course assumes familiarity with basic computer organization- how processors and memory work; it will also use data structures like lists.

The programming assignments will be done in Java.

According to the Catalog, CS U380 is the formal prerequisite.

Teacher

John Casey
Office: 348 West Village H
Phone: 373 - 3550; email: jcasey@ccs.neu.edu
Office hours: To Be Announced
or just come find me in my office or the lab.

Overview

An introduction to the basic concepts underlying how operating systems and networks get their work done.

Topics

Some of the topics covered will be process management (creation, synchronization, and communication); processor scheduling; deadlock prevention, avoidance, and recovery; main-memory management; virtual memory management(swapping, paging, segmentation and page-replacement algorithms).

And, for networks: protocols on the Internet; edge vs. core; circuit switching vs. packet switching; delay and loss in packet-switched networks; protocol layers and service models

Student responsibilities

1. Students are expected to attend classes regularly, to be on time, and not to leave the classroom before the class is over.

2. Readings, exercises, quizzes, two or three programming assignments, one exam, and a final.

Plagiarism

We encourage people to get together and discuss the assignments, prepare for tests, etc. But this is not the same as copying some one else's code or answers to assignments. If we find material that is substantially the same in two people's work, we'll follow the University's procedures.

After today's class:

Read Silberschatz, Sections 1.1 - 1.5, pp. 3 - 20.

Textbooks


1. Abraham Silberschatz, Peter Baer Galvin, and Greg Gagne. Operating System Concepts. Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, 2005.
Seventh edition.

Any of several other very similar recent editions of this book should also suffice.

and

2. James F. Kurose and Keith W. Ross.
Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet. Addison-Wesley, Boston, 2005.
Third edition.

Other Ways to Learn

Another commonly used textbook, which you might find useful, is:
Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Modern Operating Systems: Second Edition. Prentice-Hall, 2001.