| Week | Date | Topic(s) | Facilitator(s) | Paper(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 8/28 | — | Eide | organizational meeting |
| 2 | 9/4 | software debloating | Eide | DECAF: Automatic, Adaptive De-bloating and Hardening of COTS Firmware. Jake Christensen et al. In USENIX Security ’20, Aug. 2020. |
| 3 | 9/11 | non-volatile memory | Ricci | Twizzler: A Data-Centric OS for Non-Volatile Memory. Daniel Bittman et al. In ATC ’20, Jul. 2020. |
| 4 | 9/18 | secure software development | Maricq | Understanding Security Mistakes Developers Make: Qualitative Analysis from Build It, Break It, Fix It. Daniel Votipka et al. In USENIX Security ’20, Aug. 2020. |
| 5 | 9/25 | microkernel design | Johnson | Harmonizing Performance and Isolation in Microkernels with Efficient Intra-kernel Isolation and Communication. Jinyu Gu et al. In ATC ’20, Jul. 2020. |
| 6 | 10/2 | virtual RDMA | Ford | FreeFlow: Software-based Virtual RDMA Networking for Containerized Clouds. Daehyeok Kim et al. In NSDI ’19, Feb. 2019. |
| 7 | 10/9 | storage system tuning | Duplyakin | Carver: Finding Important Parameters for Storage System Tuning. Zhen Cao et al. In FAST ’20, Feb. 2020. |
| 8 | 10/16 | network performance isolation | Walker | PicNIC: Predictable Virtualized NIC. Praveen Kumar et al. In SIGCOMM ’19, Aug. 2019. |
| 9 | 10/23 | adaptive storage function placement | Bhardwaj | Adaptive Placement for In-memory Storage Functions. Ankit Bhardwaj et al. In ATC ’20, Jul. 2020. |
| 10 | 10/30 | web acceleration | — | At 10:00 AM: Oblique: Accelerating Page Loads Using Symbolic Execution. James Mickens. Presentation in the UMass CS Systems Lunch, Oct. 30, 2020. |
| 11 | 11/6 | reliable replication | Lee | Hermes: A Fast, Fault-Tolerant and Linearizable Replication Protocol. Antonios Katsarakis et al. In ASPLOS ’20, Mar. 2020. |
| 12 | 11/13 | software-defined radio | Webb | SparSDR: Sparsity-proportional Backhaul and Compute for SDRs. Moein Khazraee et al. In MobiSys ’19, Jun. 2019. |
| 13 | 11/20 | DBMS fuzzing | Eide | Testing Database Engines via Pivoted Query Synthesis. Manuel Rigger and Zhendong Su. In OSDI ’20, Nov. 2020. |
| 14 | 11/27 | — | — | no meeting — Thanksgiving break |
| 15 | 12/4 | hypervisor fuzzing | Remes | NYX: Greybox Hypervisor Fuzzing using Fast Snapshots and Affine Types. Sergej Schumilo et al. In USENIX Security ’21, Aug. 2021. To appear. |
The fall 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 fall 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.
To get on the class mailing list, use Mailman to subscribe to csl-sem.
The course syllabus contains important information for students, including the course's policies on grading and cheating.
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.
Upcoming and recent conference proceedings are good sources of papers for discussion. Below are links to some relevant conference series.
| Semester | Focus Topic(s) |
|---|---|
| Spring 2020 | no focus topic chosen |
| 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 |