CSE 120 Winter 2001 Course Information

CSE 120 Winter 2001

Principles of Computer Operating Systems

Information
Syllabus
Homeworks
Programming projects
Some lecture notes

Professor Keith Marzullo, APM 4832, 858 534-7029. Office hours Wednesday 2:30-3:30 or by appointment.

TAs Anirban Bagchi and Sriram Ramabhadran. Office hours Monday 10am - 12 noon (APM 3337d) and Friday 11 am - 1 pm (APM 3337a).

Lecture Tuesday, Thursday Cognitive Science Building 001 9:35 - 10:55 AM.

Discussion Wednesday Humanities and Social Science Building 1330 11:15 AM - 12:05 PM. Note that discussion section is an integral part of the course. New material that you will be expected to know will be presented.

Discussion board web page:at http://discus.ucsd.edu.

Text Modern Operating Systems by Andrew Tanenbaum. This text is nine years old and has been used in previous quarters. You should be able to find it at a discounted price at the various bookstores on campus and nearby.

Overview This course covers the principles of operating systems. Of particular importance is concurrency, processor multiplexing, memory multiplexing, and communications.

Grading Your grade for this course will be computed as follows:

Homeworks 20%

Midterm 25%

Final 25%

Programming projects 30%

Homeworks There will be four homework assignments. They will be distributed on the web. Please e-mail your answers (ASCII preferred, postscript and pdf accepted, MS word format not accepted) to cs120w@sdcc7.ucsd.edu. Your homeworks are all due on class days, and they need to be postmarked by the time that the class starts. We won't be accepting late homework, so please get them in on time.

Please include in the subject line of the email your name and the homework number. If you don't use ASCII, then please send your homework as a MIME attachment.

Midterm The midterm will be given in class on 13 February 2001. It will be an open textbook and open notes test. Of course, this means that I'll ask questions that are not easily answered by looking them up in the textbook. The homeworks are a good approximation of what the midterm (and final) questions will look like. Here are the questions and answers for the midterm.

Final When we know when the final is, we'll post the time here. Like the midterm, it will be an open textbook and open notes test.

Projects There are three programming projects, the details for which can be found here. You will be working in teams on the projects. I'll decide the number of students a team should have by the end of the first week of class. You may need to reform your team for the second project depending on how the size of the course changes.
We'll want you to write your projects in C and have them compile and run on the machines in OSTL. You can use your own machines to develop the projects, of course, but you'll need to run your experiments on the machines in OSTL. If you don't know C, you will find it a simple (if somewhat arcane) language to learn. (If you know C++, then you'll find C quite easy to learn). Please ask the professor or the TAs for recommendations on C manuals or for help in using the C compiler or debugger.

Academic integrity The guiding principle of academic integrity is simple: the work that you submit for grading should reflect only your own work, or in the case of the projects the work of your team. A deeper discussion on academic integrity can be found here (which is adapted from Scott Baden's Academic Integrity Agreement).

Note 1: I don't accept Winword because it is not an imaging standard; it is meant for exchange of files among users of MS Word. Postscript and PDF are imaging standards. The most robust standard is ASCII: you will be able to open and read any ASCII file you create throughout you life (the difficulty you will have is keeping a copy of it on a medium that will be readable).

Note 2: I set this deadline so I can discuss the homework during the class period of the day that the homework is due. I've noticed that some users of non-UCSD network providers are surprised at how long mail may languish before it is actually sent to me; some have reported a delay of over 12 hours. I haven't tried to figure out what happened to cause such delays, but I'd guess that you'd know what is required to ensure that your email is sent in a timely manner.

last edited 2 January 2001 by kam