CS 730: Topics in Operating Systems

Credits: 3-0-0-0 (9)

Prerequisite

Expertise in programming using C/C++, undergraduate course on Operating Systems (for Masters and Ph.D. students). For IIT Kanpur UG students, CS330 is a prerequisite. Exposure to one or more of the following courses---CS622/CS422, CS614, CS610/CS423/CS433---is desirable but not a mandatory requirement.
 

Course Objective

Understanding the challenges of system software design is crucial in modern era computing as system softwares are backbones of many computing models like cloud computing, LLM inference systems, big-data analytics etc.  One of the main goals of this course is to take a deep-dive into one or more contemporary system design aspects exposing the students to the design issues and tradeoffs in the system software layers. The foucs of this course would be to explore and enhance practical system deployments.
 

In the current offering (2026-27 winter semester), the focus will be on Data Management for Accelerators.

 

References:

1. Relevant research papers
2. Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. Online 2018.
3. Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati, Understanding the Linux Kernel - from I/O ports to process management (Third ed.), O'Reilly 2005.
4. Robert Love. Linux Kernel Development (Third ed.), O'Reilly 2010.
5. James E. Smith, Ravi Nair, Virtual machines - versatile platforms for systems and processes, Elsevier 2005.