George Mason University

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

CS 471   Operating Systems  -  Spring 2008

Friday 1:30 – 4:15 P.M.
Innovation Hall Rm. 136


 

Instructor: Dr. Hakan Aydin

 



Description: This course covers the principles of operating systems theory and practice. Fundamental concepts such as processes, synchronization, scheduling, memory management, file systems and security will be presented.

Prerequisites: CS 310 and CS 365. In order to be able to work on the programming projects, the students must be comfortable with C/C++ or Java programming languages.

Readings:
Required Textbook: "Operating System Concepts", by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne (7th Edition, John Wiley & Sons 2005, ISBN 0-471-69466-5).
"Modern Operating Systems" by A.S. Tanenbaum (3rd Edition, Prentice Hall 2008,ISBN: 0-13-600663-9) is another good book on the principles of operating systems.

Office Hours: Thursday 7:20 PM – 8:20 PM, Friday 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM, and  by appointment (Office: ST II, Room 401).

Topics:

  • Introduction to Operating Systems
  • Processes and Threads
  • Interprocess Communication, Synchronization
  • CPU Scheduling
  • Memory Management
  • File and I/0 Systems
  • Distributed Systems
  • Protection and Security

 

TA: Taywin Boonjindasap (tboonjin@gmu.edu)
TA Office Hours: Tuesday 1 – 3 PM, Friday 11 AM  – 1 PM
TA Office: ST II, Room 365

Grading:

  • Midterm exam 30%
  • Final exam 35%
  • Homeworks and Programming Projects 35%

 

The students must achieve a total score of at least 90 (out of 100) to be considered for an A.
A total score of 49 or less will result in F.
No early exams will be given and make-up exams are strongly discouraged.
A student should present an official and verifiable excuse to miss an exam (such as a doctor's note).

GMU Honor Code will be enforced. Collaboration will be allowed only for the group projects and group homeworks, within each group. The students will work individually on other homeworks and projects. We reserve the right to use MOSS or any other automated mechanism to detect plagiarism. Violations of GMU Honor Code will result in an F.

Course Web Page: http://cs.gmu.edu/~aydin/cs471


Computer Accounts: Any student who is planning to work on IT&E lab computers for programming projects should obtain an account (Information here)