As mentioned in my first post this morning, today marks the first day of Fall 2020 and I’m taking advanced operating systems (AOS), a systems class I’ve had a burning desire to take close to two years ago.

The first assignment assigned in course is a pre-assessment, consisting of 22 yes/no answers, designed to to “gauge readiness for this graduate-level Advanced Operating Systems course”. I filled out this document (screenshot below) and my answers are mixed but overall I’m pretty prepared.  Of the 22 questions, I answered “yes” to 18 of them, “no” to four.  Based off of that, I’m about 81% prepared for this course.

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CS 6210 (Advanced Operating Systems) is a graduate level course that covers in detail many advanced topics in operating system design and implementation. It starts with topics such as operating systems structuring, multi-threading and synchronization and then moves on to systems issues in parallel and distributed computing systems. There is no textbook for this course. Rather, we will read and discuss a number of important research papers related to these topics. For each paper that is covered in class , students are expected to gain a solid understanding of the problem that is addressed by the paper, and the solution proposed by the authors.

Today is officially first day of Fall 2020. We’re still in the midst of COVID19 but given that that my online masters program in computer science has always been conducted fully remote (i.e. distance education), there’s no changes for me, really (as it relates to education). This semester, I’ll be taking advanced operating systems¹, a course that’s really focused on distributed systems.

Before jumping into watching the video lectures, I’m going to take a brief assessment² that’s required of us students. This pre-assessment helps us students gain a better understanding of the prerequisite concepts necessary for success in this course”. Then I’ll download the syllabus, set up my workstation (for projects and lab environment), then if I’m lucky, watch a video lecture videos.

References

1.  https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-6210-advanced-operating-systems-course-videos
2. https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~rama/CS6210-External/cs6210_diagnostic.pdf

Appendix

Didn’t sleep well last night for whatever reason. Probably because so many thoughts were racing through my mind (like starting this semester) and as a result, my brain woke up at around 04:30 AM. Oh well. I’m going to get the day started early since today is also my first day back at work after taking a (much needed) one week vacation. Better get cracking now because Elliott will be waking up any minute now.