CS 146a: Assignment 9, (November 6 through November 13, 07)

NEW: Study guide for quiz 2 has been posted.

For Class Discussion, Friday, November 9, 07

Read A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID), by Patterson et al. (Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD Conference, 1988):

For your reading report answer the following question:

Explain why RAID level 3 is a better match for supercomputing applications than transaction processing systems.

NEWS: We are switching the QUIZ 2 and class times on Tuesday Nov 13: the quiz will be held during class time 10:40am-12pm in Volen 106, the make up class will be held at 7pm-8:30pm, Volen 106

For Class Discussion, Tue, November 13, 07

The technical reading for the class is: "The design and implementation of a log-structured file system", by Mendel Rosenblum and John K. Ousterhout.

For your reading report answer the following question:

What the major differences are between LFS and a standard UNIX file system. What hardware advances does LFS take advantage of? Which components of the UNIX file system does LFS re-use and why?

For Background Material

Read Tanenbaum, Chapter 11, Section 4. This section covers transactions. Read the section with care.

For Discussion Class, Friday, November 16, 07 (Atomicity and Transactions)

We will study transactions. Read Chapter 9 (Atomicity) Sections A, B, and C. The material should be mostly familiar from 31a but presented differently, still its a lot of reading - no reading assignment!

System aphorism of the week
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair. - Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless (Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy V, Heinemann, London, 1992. ISBN 0434 00926 1)

CS 146a Handout 9, issued 11/7/07