Blog

  • Questions I thought about during the day How did society overcome the Spanish Flu and how did the people during that time return back to normal? I doubt some vaccination ended the pandemic… so how did we all get over it? And how will it be the same (or different) this time around with COVID-19…

    Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/28
  • The purpose of this post is to take a snapshot of my understanding before I begin working on project 2: implementing (two) synchronization barriers. Although I picked up some theoretical knowledge from both this course (i.e. advanced operating systems) and GIOS (i.e. graduate introduction to operating systems) on barrier synchronization, I actually never implemented barriers…

    Project 2 (barrier synchronization) – Snapshot of my knowledge
  •   Writing Published a post on the anki settings I used to cram for the midterm exam Family and Friends Walked the dogs at Magnuson Park. Elliott and Jess joined too since Elliott has been waking up so early these days (around 05:45 AM). Trying to get the dogs to capitalize on these amazing off…

    Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/27
  • This past week, I skipped writing my daily reviews for two days in a row because I was really pressed for time. On the days that I skipped, I immediately started studying for the midterm exam as soon as I woke up. Looking back, I regret not writing anything down. Because I’ve already forgotten the…

    Weekly Review: week ending in 2020/09/27
  • I spent a few minutes fiddling with my Anki settings yesterday, modifying the options for the advanced operating systems deck that I had created to help me prepare for the midterm. Although Anki’s default settings are great for committing knowledge and facts over a long period of time (thanks to its internal algorithm exploiting the…

    My Anki settings for cramming for an exam
  • OS for parallel machines Summary There are many challenges that the OS faces when building for parallel machines: size bloat (features OS just has to run), memory latency (1000:1 ratio) and numa effects (one process accessing another process’s memory across the network), false sharing (although I’m not entirely sure whether false sharing is a net…

    Shared memory multiprocessing (notes for advanced operating systems)
  • Question 3d   The algorithm is implemented on a cache coherent architecture with an invalidation-based shared-memory bus. The circular queue is implemented as an array of consecutive bytes in memory such that each waiting thread has a distinct memory location to spin on. Let’s assume there are N threads (each running on distinct processors) waiting…

    Midterm preparation (part 3/3) – Virtualization to Test-And-Set
  • Today I’m posting a super short daily review given that the midterm (for advanced operating systems) opens up in about 13 hours. Writing Published on drifting apart (as part of my daily review) Published my first set of guesses to the mid term questions Parenting and family matters Held Elliott in my arms while we…

    Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/24
  • This is a continuation of me attempting to answer the midterm questions without peeking at the answers. Part 1 covered questions from OS Structures and this post (part 2) covers virtualization and includes questions revolving around memory management in hypervisors and how to test-and-set atomic operations work. A few useful links I found while trying…

    Midterm preparation (part 2/3) – Virtualization to Test-And-Set
  • Thanks to my wife for encouraging me to pull the trigger and start my online study group (i.e. the “war room”) for my advanced operating systems course. Basically, the idea came about after chatting with a class mate of mine and during our video call, I realized how many of us are basically studying alone…

    On building online learning communities & Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/23