DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
Instructor: Dr. Elizabeth White
Description: This course covers the principles of operating systems
theory and practice. Fundamental concepts such as processes, synchronization,
scheduling and memory management will be presented. Another emphasis will be on
the principles of distributed operating systems.
Prerequisites: CS 310 and CS 365, or equivalent. A solid background in
Computer Architecture is required. In order to be able to work on the
programming projects, the students must be comfortable with C/C++ or
Java programming languages.
Meeting Times and Locations:
Required Textbook: "Operating System Concepts", by Silberschatz,
Galvin and Gagne (7th Edition, John Wiley & Sons 2005, ISBN 0-471-69466-5).
"Modern Operating Systems" (2nd edition, Prentice Hall 2001, ISBN:
0-13-031358-0), by A. S. Tanenbaum is another good book on the principles of
operating systems.
As additional reference on distributed systems, the following book can be
recommended: "Distributed Systems: Concept and Design" (4th Edition,
Addison-Wesley 2005, ISBN 0321263545), by Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg.
Office Hours: Wednesday: 2-4 p.m., and by appointment (Office: ST II,
Room 429)
Teaching Assistant (TA):
TA Office Hours:
Course Web Page: http://cs.gmu.edu/~white/CS571
Topics:
Grading:
No early exams will be given and make-up exams are strongly
discouraged.
GMU Honor Code
will be enforced. The students are supposed to work individually on the
assignments/projects. Collaboration will be allowed only for the group
projects, within each group. We reserve the right to use MOSS to detect plagiarism.
Violations of GMU Honor Code or a total score of 49 (or less) will result in an
F.
Computer Accounts: All students should have accounts on the central
Mason Unix system mason.gmu.edu
(also known as
osf1.gmu.edu) and on IT&E Unix
cluster zeus.ite.gmu.edu
(Instructions and related links are here). Students
can work in IT&E computer
labs for programming projects during the specified hours.
Distance Education Session: CS 571 Fall 2007 session will be simultaneously offered to GMU Distance Education students. The distance education students will be given the midterm and final exam in campus, on the same day as Section 001 (Wednesday Section) students. The location of exams will be announced in due course.
The due dates for the assignments will be the same for Section 001 and Distance Education (Section 002) students. Each project will have a soft copy and hard copy component that must be submitted by the date specified on the project handouts. Students in all sections will be required to give the demo of the last programming project in person, in the instructor’s office.
The course is delivered to the Internet section online by Network EducationWare (NEW), developed by Prof. Mark Pullen and his students at GMU.
Students in both sections will have accounts on NEW and will be able to play back the lectures and download the PDF slide files at http://disted.ite.gmu.edu.
Students enrolled to the on-line (distance education) section can find
detailed information about the system, requirements and installation/connection
issues at Distance Education Web Page
(http://disted.ite.gmu.edu). If you are not able find an answer to a
technical issue regarding the NEW software, please send e-mail to
disted@netlab.gmu.edu