18-546 Lectures and Readings (Spring 2001)
For some class meetings, readings will be assigned. Usually, these readings
will consist of relevant technical papers, articles or instructor-prepared
notes.
Paper copies of assigned readings and notes will be provided in class
and in the course file cabinet. The latter is just outside the elevator
on the D-level of Hamerschlag Hall.
(NOTE: THIS SCHEDULE IS HIGHLY PRELIMINARY, IN TERMS OF LECTURE CONTENTS,
LECTURE ORDER, AND ESPECIALLY DATES. ALSO, GUEST LECTURES ARE STILL
BEING SET UP. ALL IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE.)
January 15 : No Class for Martin Luther King remembrance
January 17 : Welcome to 18-546
This first meeting will be more than just organizational in nature.
We will discuss how the class is going to work and what will (and won't)
be covered.
See the 18-546 overview for a recap of the
general information.
We will also dive into the course by overviewing the area of storage
systems.
Overview of topic.
January 22 : Metrics of I/O system quality
Readings for today:
- MTBF Description
- Chapter 6.4 (I/O performance measures) of Patterson and Hennessy
January 24 : Disk drive operation
Readings for today:
- An introduction to disk drive modeling (Ruemmler & Wilkes, 1994)
January 29 : Disk drive firmware
Readings for today:
- Chapter 4 (pg 39-54) of Toigo
January 31 : Disk request scheduling
Readings for today:
- Scheduling for modern disk drives (Worthington, 1994)
February 5 : Disk block caching
Readings for today:
- Disk Cache Analysis and Design (Smith, 1985)
February 7 : Buses, interconnects, SANs
Readings for today:
- Chapter 11: SCSI Architecture (handout)
February 12 : Controllers and device drivers
Readings for today:
- Chapter 4 from Toigo book -- pages 54-71
- Chapter 6 from Toigo book -- all
February 14 : Storage protocols
Readings for today:
- Performance characterization of large and long fibre channel arbitrated
loops (Ruwart, 1999)
February 19 : File system organization
Readings for today:
- Chapter 2 from Practical File System Design (What is a file system?)
- Chapter 8 from UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers (File system interface
and framework)
- Optional: Basic intro to the Linux Ext2 filesystem
February 21 : File system integrity
Readings for today:
- Soft updates: A solution to the metadata problem in file systems
(Ganger, et al., 2000)
- Chapter 7 from Practical File System Design (Journaling)
February 26 : File system performance
Readings for today:
- Chapter 7.1-7.3, 8 from Design and Implementation of 4.4 BSD OS
(Local filesystems and filestores)
February 28 : Data naming and organization
Readings for today:
- Chapter 5 from Practical File System Design (Attributes, indexing, and
queries)
March 5 : Database storage management
Readings for today:
- Chapter 4 from Fundamentals of Database Systems (Record storage and
primary file organizations)
March 7 : Exam 1
March 14 : I/O parallelism: Disk striping and RAID arrays
Readings for today:
- A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (Patterson, Gibson, &
Katz, 1988)
- RAID: High-performance, reliable secondary storage (Chen, Lee, Gibson,
Katz & Patterson)
March 16 : I/O parallelism: RAID arrays
Readings for today:
- Towards availability benchmarks: A case study of software RAID systems
(Brown & Patterson, 2000)
- The Architecture of a fault-tolerant cached RAID controller (Menon &
Cortney, 1993)
- Chapter 6.8 (EMC Symmetrix and Celerra)
March 19 : Distributed filesystems
Readings for today:
- NFS v3 RFC 1813
- Chapter 7 from Toigo
March 21 : Distributed filesystems II
Readings for today:
- File system design for an NFS file server appliance (Hitz, Lau, & Malcolm,
1994)
- The advancement of NFS benchmarking: SFS 2.0 (Robinson, 1999)
March 26/28 : No classes (spring break)
April 4 : Network-attached storage
Readings for today:
- Chapter 3 from Khalil Amiri's PhD thesis (Amiri, 2000)
- Network-attached storage architecture (Gibson, Van Meter, 2000)
April 6 : Backup and disaster recovery
Readings for today:
- Evaluating Backup Algorithms (Kurmas & Chervenak, 1999)
April 11 : Another pass thru NAS
Readings for today:
- Failure-atomic access in an interposed network storage system (Anderson &
Chase, 2000)
April 13 : Wide-area caching
Readings for today:
- Issues in file cache management for mobile computing (Froese & Bunt
- Managing update conflicts in Bayou (Terry, et al., 1995)
April 16 : Storage access control
Readings for today:
- Chapter 3 from Howard Gobioff's PhD thesis (Gobioff)
April 18 : Distributed storage security
Readings for today:
April 25 : Alternate storage technologies
Readings for today:
April 27 : Capacity planning
Readings for today:
- Lectures 2-4 from Mor Harchol-Balter's Performance analysis class
- Chapter 6.8 EMC Symmetrix and Celerra
- Symmetrix 8000 product description guide
April 30 : Wrap-up
May 2 : Exam 2