Dependable Systems, ECE 1781

Course Description

Modern computer systems have become tightly intertwined with our daily lives. However, they are failure-prone and difficult to manage and thus hardly dependable. Today, these problems dominate total cost of ownership of computer systems, and unfortunately they have no simple solutions. There is a realization that these problems cannot be decisively solved but are ongoing facts of life that must be dealt with regularly. To do so, systems should be designed to detect, isolate and recover from these problems.

This advanced graduate-level course focuses on dependability in software systems and examines current research that aims to address challenges caused by software and hardware bugs and software misconfiguration. Students are expected to read and critique recent research papers in operating systems that cover these areas. They are also expected to work on a research project and make class presentations. While there are no specific prerequisites for this course, students who have taken undergraduate or graduate courses in operating systems, networks and distributed systems will have an edge.

Textbooks

There are no required textbooks for this course. The optional textbooks are

Modern Operating Systems (Third Edition), by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Published by Prentice Hall, 2008.
Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (Fourth Edition), by George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore and Tim Kindberg. Published by Addison Wesley, 2005.

Mailing List

Please subscribe to the class mailing list by joining the UofT ECE1781 Google Group. Subscribing to the group may require the instructor's approval.

The instructor will use this group to send instructions and reminders. You can send email to the class by sending mail to this list. If you have a specific question for the instructor, please send an email to the instructor directly.

Grading Policy

Grades will be based on class presentations, a class project, and class participation. There will be no final exam in this course. The grading breakup is as follows:

Class presentation: 30%
Class project: 50%
Class participation: 20%

Note: If a student is unable to attend a class, he or she will lose 2% for non-participation.

Class Presentation

Each week this class will cover a group of papers that focuses on a specific aspect of the course. Students are expected to read all the papers in the group that will be presented. At the beginning of the term, each paper will be assigned to a student who will be presenting the paper. Presentations will be limited to roughly 20 minutes.

More details about the presentation format. Please read very carefully.

Assignments

There will be no assignments in this course.

Class Project

A major component of this course is devoted to a term-long project. The topic of the project is largely up to you, but to help you choose a project, a sample list of projects is provided below. This list should help students determine whether their own projects are of reasonable size and scope.

More details about the project format. Please read very carefully.

Project Ideas

Here is a list of project ideas.

Readings

This is a tentative list. Most of these papers can be accessed from the ACM web site. If you cannot access ACM articles directly, please read the following instructions for accessing the papers.