CS 7934 — Computer Systems Seminar, Spring 2020

Fridays, 2:00–3:30 PM, 3485 MEB Online!

Instructor: Eric Eide

Schedule

Week Date Topic(s) Facilitator(s) Paper(s)
1 1/10 Eide no meeting — organizational email
2 1/17 user tracking Eide Watching You Watch: The Tracking Ecosystem of Over-the-Top TV Streaming Devices. Hooman Mohajeri Moghaddam et al. In CCS ’19, Nov. 2019.
3 1/24 userspace networking Johnson Snap: A Microkernel Approach to Host Networking. Michael Marty et al. In SOSP ’19, Oct. 2019.
4 1/31 orbital edge computing Darragh Orbital Edge Computing: Nanosatellite Constellations as a New Class of Computer System. Bradley Denby and Brandon Lucia. In ASPLOS ’20, Mar. 2020.
5 2/7 fuzz testing Watson Semantic Fuzzing with Zest. Rohan Padhye et al. In ISSTA ’19, Jul. 2019.
6 2/14 compiler fuzzing Hatch History-Guided Configuration Diversification for Compiler Test-Program Generation. Junjie Chen et al. In ASE ’19, Nov. 2019.
7 2/21 no meeting — student research posters
8 2/28 privacy leakage Bartlett 50 Ways to Leak Your Data: An Exploration of Apps' Circumvention of the Android Permissions System. Joel Reardon et al. In USENIX Security ’19, Aug. 2019.
9 3/6 virtual machine monitors Maricq Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications. Alexandru Agache et al. In NSDI ’20, Feb. 2020.
10 3/13 no meeting — University spring break
Meetings on and after 3/20 will be held online.
11 3/20 sharding Samanta Slicer: Auto-Sharding for Datacenter Applications. Atul Adya et al. In OSDI ’16, Nov. 2016.
12 3/27 Spectre mitigation Jolly JumpSwitches: Restoring the Performance of Indirect Branches In the Era of Spectre. Nadav Amit et al. In ATC ’19, Jul. 2019.
13 4/3 browser security Moffat Fidelius: Protecting User Secrets from Compromised Browsers. Saba Eskandarian et al. In IEEE S&P ’19, May 2019.
14 4/10 reproducibility Ricci Reproducible Containers. Omar S. Navarro Leija et al. In ASPLOS ’20, Mar. 2020.
15 4/17 serverless computing Li Serverless in the Wild: Characterizing and Optimizing the Serverless Workload at a Large Cloud Provider. Mohammad Shahrad et al. arXiv:2003.03423v2 [cs.DC], Mar. 2020.

Overview

The spring 2020 offering of CS 7934 will cover a variety of systems topics, with an eye toward two goals.

The first is to increase participants' familiarity with recent and important results in the area of computer systems research. Attendees will read and discuss papers from recent and imminent top-tier systems conferences: e.g., SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, SIGCOMM, FAST, systems-related security conferences, and so on. Attendees will typically discuss one paper each week. Papers will be selected for their relevance to participants' research or upcoming Utah visitors. In contrast to some recent offerings of the seminar, there is no preset “focus topic” for spring 2020. One can anticipate, however, that the semester will include discussions about operating systems, distributed systems, cloud computing, datacenters, networking, and security.

The second is to be a venue for student presentations. Every student participating in the seminar will be required to lead at least one meeting during the semester. This may be a “formal” research presentation—ideally of a student's current work—or it may be an analysis of the research papers chosen for a seminar meeting.

CS 7934 is often called “the CSL seminar.” The name CSL is historic.

Mailing list

To get on the class mailing list, use Mailman to subscribe to csl-sem.

Syllabus

The course syllabus contains important information for students, including the course's policies on grading and cheating.

Credit

Students may enroll for one (1) credit.

Those taking the course for credit must read all of the assigned papers, submit a short summary of each assigned paper prior to class (PDF, LaTeX), participate in each discussion, and facilitate at least one seminar meeting during the semester. Refer to the syllabus for further information.

Potential Papers

Upcoming and recent conference proceedings are good sources of papers for discussion. Below are links to some relevant conference series.

Past CSL Seminars

Semester Focus Topic(s)
Fall 2019 no focus topic chosen
Spring 2019 no focus topic chosen
Fall 2018 no focus topic chosen
Spring 2018 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’17 papers
Fall 2017 no focus topic chosen
Spring 2017 no focus topic chosen
Fall 2016 no focus topic chosen; many SIGCOMM ’16 papers
Spring 2016 no focus topic chosen
Fall 2015 no focus topic chosen; many systems security papers
Spring 2015 no focus topic chosen
Fall 2014 no focus topic chosen; many OSDI ’14 papers
Spring 2014 no focus topic chosen; many systems security papers
Fall 2013 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’13 papers
Spring 2013 reversible and “time-traveling” debugging
Fall 2012 modern networking and network management; peer-review process
Spring 2012 systems approaches to dynamic problem detection and repair
Fall 2011 datacenter architectures and issues
Spring 2011 malicious software, i.e., malware
Fall 2010 systems approaches to security
Spring 2010 testbed-like infrastructures for cloud computing and scientific computing
Fall 2009 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’09 papers
Fall 2008 no focus topic chosen; many OSDI ’08 papers
Summer 2008 no focus topic chosen; informal biweekly meetings
Spring 2008 no focus topic chosen
Fall 2007 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’07 papers
Fall 2006 no focus topic chosen; many OSDI ’06 papers
Fall 2005 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’05 papers
Spring 2005 no focus topic chosen; many NSDI ’05 papers

Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional