One focus of this class will be semester-long projects done by groups of two to four students. These projects may deal with any aspect of current operating systems research. They may be quantitiative (encouraged), though projects that propose new designs and compare them with existing ideas are also acceptable. Projects that merely summarize work from existing papers are not sufficient; the project must be more than a "book report" on papers in a particular field.

Possible project topics

These project topics range from vague to specific. Those that are vague are intentionally so; students are encouraged to propose their own more specific topics, possibly after talking with the professor and/or TA.

• Global file systems: naming, caching, and more...
  • Using content-derived names to identify files in a global file system
• Mobile operating systems: file systems, power consumption, etc.
• Operating systems for networks of workstations
  • Spreading work around a workstation cluster (process migration)
  • File systems
  • Memory management (shared memory pools?)
• New directions in microkernels
• Extending operating systems: safe user-level extensions, dynamic patching
• Using, managing and searching through terabytes of storage