Best Papers
| CSC 213 |
Operating Systems and Parallel Algorithms |
Fall 2008 |
Introduction
We will read and discuss in class one or two of the best papers from
the most recent top systems conferences. In this way, we'll be learning
together:
- How to read research papers
- About the latest in OS research
- What the community thinks is currently important
Candidates
Our candidates (listed in no particular order) are drawn from
OSDI'06 (the 2008 conference will happen this December, so watch for
those new best papers!), USENIX'07, USENIX'08, FAST'07, SOSP'07. See
the list of papers below and read their abstracts.
-
"Rethink
the Sync" by Edmund B. Nightingale, Kaushik Veeraraghavan,
Peter M. Chen, and Jason Flinn (OSDI '06)
-
"Bigtable:
A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data" by Fay
Chang, Jeffrey Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Wilson C. Hsieh, Deborah
A. Wallach, Mike Burrows, Tushar Chandra, Andrew Fikes, and Robert
E. Gruber (OSDI '06)
-
"SafeStore:
A Durable and Practical Storage System" by Ramakrishna Kotla,
Lorenzo Alvisi, and Mike Dahlin(USENIX '07)
-
"TFS:
A Transparent File System for Contributory Storage" by James
Cipar, Mark D. Corner, and Emery D. Berger (FAST '07)
-
"Secure
Web Applications via Automatic Partitioning" by Stephen Chong, Jed
Liu, Andrew C. Myers, Xin Qi, Krishnaprasad Vikram, Lantian Zheng, and
Xin Zheng (SOSP '07)
-
"Zyzzyva:
Speculative Byzantine Fault Tolerance" by Ramakrishna Kotla,
Lorenzo Alvisi, Mike Dahlin, Allen Clement, and Edmund
Wong (SOSP '07)
-
"Sinfonia:
A New Paradigm for Building Scalable Distributed Systems"
by Marcos K. Aguilera, Arif Merchant , Mehul Shah, Alistair Veitch,
and Christos Karamanolis (SOSP '07)
Voting
Please vote by emailing your TOP TWO choices (by number) to the instructor by November 26.
Responses
You will be required to submit an approximately one-page response to
the paper before class to help prepare you for the discussion. In
particular, you should note:
- What problem are they trying to solve?
- Why is the problem important?
- How does it currently get done and what are the limitations?
- What are the authors' goals?
- Does the paper have a scientific thesis? Is it falsifiable?
- What are the paper's claims?
- Are the claims substantiated (by theory or experiment)?
- What are the limitations of the proposed approach?
- Are there ways to extend the method?
You should include at least two primary points that critique, dispute,
extend, or reinforce the paper.
Email your responses (in plaintext, not as an attachment) to the instructor by 5 PM the day before the discussion.