Matt Chung's Site

Category: Graduate School

Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/04
Yesterday

Writing
- Blogged and published an entry for my daily review
- Blogged and published an entry explaining the libvrt’s bit map data structures that map virtual CPUs to physical CPUs
Music
- Noodled around on the guitar, playing chords in a minor key up the neck (need to start structuring and mixing up my practice sessions since they are limited to about 10-15 minutes a day — oh how fatherhood changes how we spend and maximize our alone time)
Graduate School
- Hit pause on writing C code and shifted my focus to diagramming the bitmap data structure
- Finished watching the videos lectures on “memory virtualization” and began watching the next series on CPU & Memory Virtualization
- Learned the underlying implementation of techniques such as driver ballooning and oblivious page sharing, technologies that I used to apply as a systems administrator — close to 10 years ago — when running a VMWare ESXi cluster. So awesome to be peeling off layers of the onion and gaining a deeper understanding of computer science
Work
- Met with the senior network principle engineer to discuss my design document. He agreed that the open questions I had, around failure scenarios, needed to be investigated deeper. All the points he made on data supported approach and scalability and extensibility resonated with me.
- Ordered a new develop EC2 instance, the new instance costing $110 per month (in comparison to my $25.00 instance). The portal in which I launched the instance warned me that the cost exceeds 75% of most other machines. The way I justify the decision is that I sometimes spend more time in a day watching GCC compile my code, slowing down my development velocity (which costs more than $110.00 per month).
Friends and Family
- Miss: Forgot to call my grandma using Facebook Messenger. It’s been several months since she last seen Elliott and she called me the last couple days to see her. Shucks. I even added the item to my Inbox on OmniFocus; I just didn’t reviewed my list. Oh well. Will need to come up some sort of mechanism to periodically review my calendar and my tasks throughout the day.
- Bathed Elliott last night, despite being completely shattered from waking up at 04:00 (the tiny window of focused work, whenever everyone is sleeping, even the dogs). During our bathes, we started playing this new game: I stretch out my fingers and point at my wedding ring and she tries to slide the ring off and on my finger. This game is an excellent way for her to build her motor skills and she’s improved significantly over the last couple days. It’s really cute to see her eye brows burrow when she struggles with some task and I just always try to encourage her to keep trying (and modify the game slightly to set her up for success).
Photo of the day

Mushroom looking damn beautiful

Today

As mentioned in my previous posts, I’m moving from North Seattle to Renton (the “burbs”). The entire process moving fast: in less than 3 weeks, we’ll be (fingers crossed) move into our new home that offers more space for Elliott to crawl around. We’re just waiting for the inspection report to land in our inboxes (sometime this morning) so that we can negotiate what repairs (such as replacing the water heater pressure tank) need to happen before we move in.

Organization
- Process e-mail inbox down to zero
Graduate School
- Wrap up watching lecture on CPU and device scheduling
- Run the CPU scheduling monitoring code (for Project 1) to get a sense of how the hypervisor’s default scheduler balances work out among the virtual CPUs. I’m guessing that the default behavior of the hypervisor does a decent job of scheduling work so I wonder how much my own scheduler implementation will improve utilization of the underlying physical CPUs
Mental and Physical health
- Attend acupuncture session. This will be the first acupuncture session since COVID hit back in February, almost 8 months ago. Our acupuncture closed shop, rightly slow, and only now is starting to open up her clinic.
Work
- Revisit the open comments from design review and follow up with AWS Networking teams
Family
- Check work calendar and check if I can perform the home inspection at 2:00 PM on Thursday
What are you grateful for?

Allergy season ending (no more injecting Flownase every day) and my dogs resting by my feet, providing warm company, as work remotely from home.
September 5, 2020
Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/03
Writing
- Blogged and published an entry for my daily review
- Blogged and published an entry on L3 Microkernel
Mental and Physical Health
- At the park, ran around in circles while holding Elliott in my arms … that sort of counts as exercise, right?
Music
- Nothing at all
Graduate School
- Migrated from my Virtualbox environment to Digital Ocean. My local Ubuntu instance kept crashing, the KVM service unable to start up the guest operating systems. The instances would just hang for no reason and instead of wasting time troubleshooting, I’d rather focus on the code itself
- Wrestled with libvrt’s documentation and finally was able to collect CPU statistics using the API (see snippet below). The documentation sometimes says you need to pass in a struct when they mean pointer (and vice versa)
```
cpuTime: 119900000000
root@aos-kvm-ubuntu-18:/tmp# ./vcpu-scheduler 
Num domains: 2
Active Domain IDs:
2
1
State: 1, nrVirtCpu: 2, cpuTime=311380000000
Domain CPU Stats:
cpuTime: 162140000000
cpuTime: 144030000000
State: 1, nrVirtCpu: 2, cpuTime=268990000000
Domain CPU Stats:
cpuTime: 142960000000
cpuTime: 119900000000
```
Work
- Firmed up my design document at work, addressing other engineer’s feedback that was sprinkled in the Quip document
- E-mailed Asians@ so that they include my upcoming event in the newsletter
Organization
- Using my ScanSnap IX1500, I scanned all my loose documents (e.g. tax statements, W-2 copies, etc) and then shredded them, clearing up space on my desk and just overall getting a little more organization
Friends and Family

Elliott getting stuck in 3 tier shelf
- Popped into Wells Fargo Bank to transfer earnest money to the escrow company. I had originally tried calling the bank at around 04:00 AM (when their support center opened) to have both enable wire transfers on my account and bump up the transfer limit but quickly realized that sending tens of thousands of dollars should be probably be done in person at the branch
- Unexpectedly watched Elliott for the about 3 hours yesterday. Jess was already running behind for the inspection for our new home located in Renton and Elliott was still napping. So instead of waking her up, she left her with me in the middle of the work day and now I truly understand the plight of parents all around the world, parents who need to work from home while taking care of young children: it’s impossible.
- Scheduled follow up veterinarian appointments for both Metric and Mushroom. Metric’s ear developed a little fissure in her ear, looking as if a tick made a home and then evacuated. And on the back of mushroom’s neck, there’s a maybe 5 or 6 white head looking bumps that are located in the place where I had applied her flea medication a couple weeks ago
Today

Organization
- Call Well’s Fargo (again) and see if they can bump the limit on my wire transfer since I want to avoid going to a Wells Fargo branch due to COVID-19
- Migrate straggling sticky notes that are sitting on desk and process them into “Writing Ideas” or “Inbox” in Omnifocus
Graduate School
- Finish memory virtualization series
- Write a few more lines of C code to get a better sense of how I’m going to write the scheduler (all a bit fuzzy right now). Not sure how scheduler is going to integrate with KVM and not sure what algorithms I’ll select and implement
Work
- Meet with principle network engineer to close out open questions on my design document
- Attend weekly operations meeting and discuss events that popped up throughout the week
Family
- Carry out morning routine: walk with Elliott and Jess and the dogs, blend up a delicious strawberry and blueberry and banana smoothie (thanks to Jess, who picked up the necessary ingredients from Trader Joe’s yesterday), feed the dogs their raw food
- Reply to loan broker and see if they can lock in the 2.875% rate for our mortgage
- Hold a discussion with Shuk (our realtor) and finalize what issues that popped up during home inspection need to get fixed before we move forward into the next step
What are you grateful for?
Spending 1 on 1 time with little Elliott yesterday (despite needing to watch her last minute during a work day). I cannot really explain it but I think I’m developing some sort of paternal love for my daughter, feelings that I’ve never experienced before, not for any human and not for any of my beloved pets. I cannot really describe the emotion … but she’s able to put a wrinkle in my nose just by sitting there and shooting me a smile.
Feelings
After 3 hours of watching Elliott yesterday, I was wiped out, taxed physically and emotionally. That little 11 month year old crawls faster than a rattlesnake and I’m having a hard time keeping up with her. She puts everything in her mouth, from dog hair to shreds of paper (but I would like to call out a victory from yesterday, a proud dad moment, when I was able to free a piece of paper from her mouth before she swallowed it: dad goals).
September 4, 2020
Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/02
Writing
- Blogged and published an entry for my daily review
- Blogged and published an entry that shows the steps for building librty’s documentation from source code (since the manual no longer exists on the official website)
Mental and Physical Health
- Met with my therapist, who I see every week (except last week since I had to cancel the session due to being on call)
- Shared how I enjoy mentoring other people not just on technology but on the human element of our work. That’s the good stuff.
- He thinks that my preference for having an organized mind stems from survival techniques that I developed as a young child
Music
- Practiced singing major and minor scale from memory (no instrument leading me with any tones), a skill I picked up from my guitar instructor
Graduate School
- Generated the libvrt documentation from source code
- Installed libvrt-dev, enabling me to compile the first executable binary with -lvirt flags passed to gcc
- Compiled program using example source code from documentation that I built
- Watched second part of “memory virtualization” lecture and learned that shadow pages map pages from the guest virtual operating system to machine page number
Work
- Met with someone AWS Networking , the two of us chatting about the new feature that we are going to launch in Q1 2021
- Debugged a crash with the fuzzer (frustrating because I’m unable to reproduce the crash and neither can the Principle engineer on the team)
Friends and Family
- Bathed Elliott last night, the bath running longer than usual (30 minutes instead of 10)
- Feeling very pressured and nervous around moving to Renton, so much needed to get done to make it happen (e.g. pack all of our belongings, hire a moving company, cleaning up existing house that we rent). Need to continue taking deep breathes and chip away at each task, slowly, one by one
Today

Organization
- Call Well’s Fargo (again) and see if they can bump the limit on my wire transfer since I want to avoid going to a Wells Fargo branch due to COVID-19
- Migrate straggling sticky notes that are sitting on desk and process them into “Writing Ideas” or “Inbox” in Omnifocus
Graduate School
- Wrap up memory virtualization series
- Write a few more lines of C code to get a better sense of how I’m going to write the scheduler (all a bit fuzzy right now). Not sure how scheduler is going to integrate with KVM and not sure what algorithms I’ll select and implement
Work
- E-mail Asians@ so that they include my upcoming event in the newsletter
Family
- Carry out morning routine: walk with Elliott and Jess and the dogs, blend up a delicious strawberry and blueberry and banana smoothie (thanks to Jess, who picked up the necessary ingredients from Trader Joe’s yesterday), feed the dogs their raw food
- Schedule follow up veterinarian appointments for both Metric and Mushroom
What are you grateful for?

To be in a position where I can (and have been for the last 4 years) attend therapy, thanks to my insurance covering a large portion of the bill. Everyone should be able to afford health care.

Oatmeal breakfast that Jess whipped up

Also grateful for a delicious oatmeal breakfast (above) that Jess cooked for breakfast.

Feelings
- Same as yesterday: Simultaneously excited and nervous about buying and moving into a new home
September 3, 2020
Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/01
Yesterday

Writing
- Blogged and published an entry for my daily review
- Blogged and published an entry that snapshots my understanding before starting on project 1 of advanced operating systems: writing a scheduler and writing a memory coordinator
Music
- E-mailed the singing instructor that I’ve been seeing for the last couple years, informing her that lately I’ve been too busy and had to shift around my priorities, now that I’ve stepped into fatherhood. I sorely miss singing and felt that the activity brought a breathe of fresh air into my life. Maybe I can continue and maybe I can do one off lessons: that’s always an option.
Graduate School
- Starting working on project 1 by ensuring that I can launch the virtual machines inside of my virtual box environment. Ran into a slew of issues that I’ve document and will publish on this blog
Work
- Presented and my design document for a new feature/service that AWS will be offering in the future. I had to shake off my nervousness, a feeling I get despite how well prepared and despite how number of years I’ve practiced and polished my public speaking skills
- Starting debugging a crash discovered by our Fuzzer. I never dealt directly with the fuzzer so this is a great learning opportunity to not only fix a problem but deeper understand what the fuzzer exactly is doing
Friends and Family

Excited to design and decorate my new home office
- Bathed Elliott last night. She only lasted about 5 minutes (about 1/2 to 1/3 of the time we usually take a bathe for) since she was so sleepy, despite her clocking in a one and a half hour nap, an hour longer than her other naps. Maybe she’s going through some sort of growth spurt? Maybe she’s sleeping better because I hung up curtains in room that shield her from the setting sun?
- Video chatted with Martin, the two of us discussing software and architecture design for an authentication system he is working on. Nice that I can share my thoughts around trade offs, trade offs that I’ve picked up from both working at Amazon over the years and from graduate school. For example, talking about the trade offs of caching and caching is not free: need to tackle cache consistency and cache coherency.
- Panicked panicked panicked. The offer that we put in on the house the day before has been accepted and my wife and I are officially pending on a new house located in Renton. Although I’m nervous and scared and will miss North Seattle, I know that this relocation is the right step for our family. Elliott needs more space and seeing her crawl around the living room — over and over and over again — reaffirms my decision. Not only that, but I can finally build myself a real work from home office, one that feels warm and one that I can call my own.
Today

Organization
- Plan day and week out by reviewing OmniFocus forecast events
- Process e-mail inbox down to zero
- Migrate sticky notes (written down while walking dogs in the morning) into writing tracker and OmniFocus
Graduate School
- Begin second series of lectures for advanced operating systems, lectures on “Memory Virtualization” (exciting stuff, I think)
Work
- Revisit the open comments from design review and follow up with AWS Networking teams
Family
- Check work calendar and check if I can perform the home inspection at 2:00 PM on Thursday
What are you grateful for?

Despite the fact that we’re in the midst of a pandemic, despite that the massive layoffs in America and 10% unemployment rate, I’m fortunate enough to be in a position to have earned and saved enough money to buy a house. I feel both very blessed and also guilty at the same time. I acknowledge my hard work and perseverance but also acknowledge that I could not have done this on my own: so many people have helped me along the way in my life. I must continue to return the favor.

Feelings
- Simultaneously excited and nervous about buying and moving into a new home
September 2, 2020
Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/08/31
Yesterday

Most interesting part of yesterday was a 1 on 1 video Chime chat that my co-worker scheduled with me. What started off with me stepping through our code base (for a set of features I added to the dataplane) morphed into a lengthy discussion around mental health and burning out and the idea of feeling confident in our own abilities. They had shared with me that they were starting to feel physically ill and after paying visits to the doctor for a full body check up, they discovered their symptoms manifest from mental health issues.

I’m very familiar with these feelings and can empathize.

In turn, I shared that I prioritize mental health and well being above all else and that I attend weekly therapy sessions (for the past four years) to deal with very similar issues that they are encountering: learning how to set boundaries, learning how to believe in oneself (i.e. imposter syndrome). It’s not as if I’ve completely overcome and mastered these problems; in fact, I wrestle with these issues — every day — but I now have have tools and data points to support me.

Although I love working as a software engineer, I sometimes wonder if I would pivot into a position or line of work where I can directly help people. It feels meaningful.

Writing
- Kept up with my writing cadence, publishing two small blog posts (a daily review and summary notes for the SPIN operating system structure)
Music
- Sang and played my own original guitar song I titled “Elliott’s in the house” for little Elliott while she was bouncing up and down on the couch while dinner, her mom guiding spoon fulls of avocado and noodles in her dime sized mouth
Graduate School
- Read first paper “SPIN”, performing a first pass on the paper (good to reinforce the learning material since there’s so much information packed into the lectures)
- Finished watching lectures on “Introduction to Virtualization” (learned that with paravirtualization, less than 2% code modification is necessary to integrate nicely with the underlying hypervisor)
Work
- Represented my team at the weekly operations meeting for my organization, stepping through all the high severity issues that I encountered and how they affected our metrics
- Finished a first draft of my design document, a paper that I am presenting to my organization today
- Met with a colleague of mine and confirmed that he will be participating in my fireside chat that I am organizing on behalf of Asians@ Amazon (I’m on the professional and development committee)
Family
- Gathered all the necessary documents (e.g. 2 months of pay stubs, last 2 years of W-2, etc) to submit to our lender since we needed to send an offer in for a house by today and needed a preapproval letter.
Today

Organization
- Plan day and week out by reviewing OmniFocus forecast events
- Process e-mail inbox down to zero
- Migrate sticky notes (written down while walking dogs in the morning) into writing tracker and OmniFocus
Graduate School
- Begin second series of lectures for advanced operating systems, lectures on “Memory Virtualization” (exciting stuff, I think)
Work
- Polish one pager design document for work and present
- Review dashboard in preparation for organization wide, weekly operations meeting
Family
- Morning routine of walking dogs at local Northacres park, blending a strawberry and banana smoothie (wait: no much coconut milk so that’s out of the question), eating lunch together, bathing Elliott as part of her night time routine
- Put together loan documents so that we can get a pre-approval for house that we are putting an offer in
Word of the day

insolent – adjective (adj) – showing a rude and arrogant lack of respect.

My strict teacher does not tolerate insolent behavior in her classroom

What are you grateful for?

I’m glad I’m writing down what I’m grateful for because its so easy for me to get trapped inside my own brain, my own world, when work (on call specifically) feels like a tornado.
- Jess being an amazing mom (so patient, so communicative) and leading parenting my example
Feelings
- I had lamented and avoided writing a paper at work and realized, after setting ink on paper for just a few minutes, I actually enjoyed the task but had to overcome my own fear of “not knowing enough” or “looking stupid” in front of my colleagues
- As mentioned above in the summary, I feel good when I can help and serve others. Not in a purely intellectual way, but mentally and emotionally. This is important and perhaps will steer me in a new (or same or different) direction with my career
September 1, 2020
Advanced Operating Systems: The SPIN Approach

What did I learn? What are the main takeaways?

The concept of border crossing pops up over and over again. This is a new term I never heard of prior to this class. The term is almost synonymous to a context switch but it is subtly different in the sense that a context switch (switch from one process to another or one thread to another) can occur without a border crossing, without changing the underlying hardware address space.

SPIN attempts to enforce protection at the compiler level, by using a restrictive language called Modula-3. Unlike the C language, where you can cast a pointer to whatever data structure you like, Modula-3 enforces type safety, only allowing the developer to cast a pointer to specific types of data structures that they had already specified earlier in the code.

SPIN offers extensibility by allowing different types of OS services to co-exist with one another.

But what are the trade offs with SPIN, when compared with Microkernel and Exokernel?

It appears that SPIN would be more performant than Microkernel due to no border crossings while maintaining flexibilty (multiple types of OS services that cater to application processes) and security (via logical protection domains) with Modula-3, allowing code OS services library code to co-locate with kernel code.

Introduction

Customizing OS with SPIN

Summary

SPIN and Exokernel take two different paths to achieving extensibility. These designs overcome the issue of Microkernel, which compromises in performance due to border crossings, and monolithic, which does not lend itself to extensibility

What we are shooting for in OS Structure

Summary

We want flexibility similar to a microkernel based approach but also want protection and performance of monolithic. We want the best of both worlds: performance protection flexibility

Approaches to Extensibility

Damn, this is a super long video (8 minutes, compared to the other one to two minute videos prior)

Capability based

Hydra OS (1981)

Summary

Hydra did not fully achieve its goal of extensibility

Micro Kernel Based

Summary

Performance took a back seat, since the focus was on extensibility and portability. Bad press for micro kernel based due to the twin goals.

SPIN approach to extensibility

Summary

By co locating the kernel and extension in the same hardware space, the extensions are cheap as procedure call. Doing this by depending on a strongly typed language to provide safety

Logical Protection Domains

Summary

Using a programing language called Modula3, which doesn’t appear to be popular in practice, we can enforce protection at the logical level. This programming language, unlike C, restricts casting pointers to random data structures, only allowing the cast to a particular data type.

Spin mechanisms for protection domains

Summary

The secret sauce of protection and performance are the mechanisms of creating (i.e. expose entry points), resolving (i.e. leverage other entry points), and combining of logical protection domains

Customized OS with Spin

Another example of SPIN os customization

Summary

There can be multiple file systems (written in Modula3), each file system catering to their callers, and each file system using the same underlying hardware address space. And they can share modules with one another, like the networking entry point.

Example Extensions

Summary

Example of Unix Servers implementing their OS on SPIN as well as a video server / display client building on top of spin

Quiz: Border Crossings

Quiz: Least likely for border crossing

Summary

Microkernel and SPIN offer performance since they limit the border crossings. In SPIN, Logical domains do not require border crossings

SPIN Mechanisms for Events

SPIN classifies three types of event handling: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one

Summary

To handle events (like packet arrival) we can have a 1:1 mapping, 1:N mapping or N:1 mapping. For 1:1, an example would be an ICMP packet arriving and the 1 ICMP handler running. In a 1:N mapping, the IP packet arrived event runs and signals three other event handlers like ICMP, UDP, or TCP. Then finally, there is a N:1, and an example of this is an Ethernet and ATM packet event arrives but both funnel into the IP handler

Default Core Services in SPIN

Summary

SPIN offers core services like memory management, CPU scheduling etc. And SPIN will provide a header file that OS programmers need to implement. Remember: these implementations talk to each other through well defined interfaces, offering protection, but are also performant cause there are no border crossings)

Default Core Services in SPIN (Continued)

Summary

Provides primitives, the interface function definition. The semantics are up to the extension itself. SPIN makes sure extensions get time on scheduler

August 31, 2020
Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/08/30
Yesterday

Writing
- Wrote and published an article on Time Management Tip #1: Pomodoro Technique. How I use the technique and how I’ve adjusted it to fit my needs.
Music
- Had my bi-weekly virtual guitar lesson with Jared. This was the first lesson back, after he took a 1.5 month sabbatical, a vacation he deserves and a vacation that he takes once a year. During the lesson, we didn’t actually focus on any mechanics of guitar this time, which was fine by me because instead, we had a lengthy discussion around where we want to take guitar lessons: what’s the point and what do I want to work towards. More on this in a separate blog post.
Graduate School
- Submitted both homework assignments (apparently a day before it was due: so hooray me) and watched the video lectures while sitting in the back seat of the car, while my wife drove us from Seattle to Renton (see house hunting below, under family section).
Organization
- Miss: I had a scheduled call at 06:00 PM PST with a fellow class mate and I missed the chat. For two reasons: my phone died on the way home and two the event was not scheduled in my calendar, no alerts or notifications. Fortunately, he was still online at the time so we were able to meet over Google Hangouts despite me being 30 minutes late or so.
Family
- House hunted in Renton, viewing three homes and one of which we will submit an offer. We’ll go in at listing price and per our realtor, a friend of my sisters, escalate to about 20k above if there are competing offers. I could really see Jess and I living in the home, the square footage practically doubling the size of our current rental. Funny how having kids changes things. Up until a week or two ago, I opposed the idea of moving to the suburbs, opposed to moving away from Maple Leaf/North Seattle: all favorite local cafes are within walking distance, the amazing off leash dog parks like Magnuson, top notch vegan restaurants. But since COVID hit, my view has changed. Based off of the amount of time we spend at home, which is about 23 out of the 24 hours in the day, I’d love for Elliott to have a little more space, more than the 15 square feet of crawling space that we have now.
Today

Organization
- Plan day and week out by reviewing OmniFocus forecast events
- Process e-mail inbox down to zero
- Migrate sticky notes (written down while walking dogs in the morning) into writing tracker and OmniFocus
Graduate School
- Begin on lecture series for the week, the lecture focusing on virtualization (curious what this means)
- Write up notes taken over the weekend on L3 Microkernel, SPIN, and Mach, three different underlying OS structures, each with their own trade offs
Work
- Finish one pager design document (due tomorrow)
- Review dashboard in preparation for organization wide, weekly operations meeting
Family
- Morning routine of walking dogs at local Northacres park, blending a strawberry and banana smoothie (wait: no much coconut milk so that’s out of the question), eating lunch together, bathing Elliott as part of her night time routine
- Put together loan documents so that we can get a pre-approval for house that we are putting an offer in
Bonus Image

Elliott standing up at the beach

Word of the day

decry – adjective (adj) – publicly denounce

“SPIN and Exokernel used Mach as a basis for decrying Microkernel-based design”

What are you grateful for?

I’m glad I’m writing down what I’m grateful for because its so easy for me to get trapped inside my own brain, my own world, when work (on call specifically) feels like a tornado.
- To be in a financial position to even be looking to buy a home in the midst of COVID-19
Feelings
- Nervous about the move. Just like Jess. Leaving behind North Seattle is scary: we’ve grown to love the city. Will we regret it? Maybe. But the way I see it is that this decision (of moving to Renton) is not a one-way door: we can always move back and rent in North Seattle. Sure, we might not get the same awesome rental that we been living in for 4+ years but that’s a fair trade off. We are doing the right thing by listening to our gut and being heedful to our fears.
August 31, 2020
Selecting research papers to read for Advanced Operating Systems
For advanced operating systems course, us students are required to sign up for (at least) two research papers that we summarize. Although two papers doesn’t sound like much, many former students of the course suggested ignore the other research papers and instead, focus on watching the lectures (which do cover the papers, sort of), banging out the software project, and (sadly) performing rote memorization based off of previous exams (I’ll need to get my Anki set up for this, stat).

Reviews on OMSCentral related to reading papers

I gave up on trying to read all the papers, electing to focus on projects and memorize the lectures instead. It worked out ok for me, and I averaged 18 hours a week on this course anyway. YMMV.

The downside to me is the number of readings was, well, high. Somewhere around 45 papers are to be read during the semester, and most of them are foundational but also from an earlier time in computing. I enjoy newer research papers with tech I can relate to, so for me in general these were less enjoyable and more difficult to digest. Still worthwhile, I think, but more of a slog.

The sheer number of papers assigned could easily push the time commitment past 30 hours a week if a student were to read them all, but as most have noted, you can largely skip reading them. Even skipping papers, the lectures are long and are difficult to get through. The content is broad and I think it tries to cover too much ground.

Papers I’m going to read

So although I’ll probably skim most of the research papers, I’ll dig into the below papers in depth. Why did I choose these papers? Well, some of the other papers (on networking) played into my strengths, categories that I’m somewhat well versed on. As a result, I chose papers grouped under categories that I not only find interesting (distributed systems and failures + recovery mechanism) but categories I’m unfamiliar with.
- Liu, Kreitz, van Renesse, Hickey, Hayden, Birman, Constable, “Building Reliable High Performance Communication Systems from Components “, 17th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, OS Review, Volume 33, Number 5, Dec. 1999.
- D. Porter, O. Hofmann, C. Rossbach, A. Benn, E. Witchel, “Operating System Transactions“, SOSP’09.
Stretch goal
- Lamport, L., “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System”, Communications of the ACM, 21, 7, pgs. 558-565, July 1978.
References
1. Student Review – https://omscentral.com/review/-M7Z0y3X-ORUdktU4bqT
2. Student Review – https://omscentral.com/review/-M74QupA7ND5_xq-cY2Z
3. Student Review – https://omscentral.com/review/-M69xss3dGXWiXXft9Ha
4. Sign up link
August 29, 2020
My classmates syllabus in excel form

One of my virtual class mates took the poorly formatted syllabus living on Canvas and converted the document into a beautifully organized excel sheet (above).

I appreciate him sharing this screenshot since it saves me at least 15 minutes from copying and pasting and wrestling with inevitable formatting issues. On top of that, I now have a better sense of what to expect over the next 14 weeks of the Fall 2020 term.

Thanks Luis Batista!

References

1 – Piazza Post: https://piazza.com/class/kduvuv6oqv16v0?cid=6_f7

August 23, 2020
My First Research Paper: COVID19 and the impact on higher education

Abstract—This research paper explores the impact of the COVID-19 health crisis on the education sector by unpacking the challenges and successes of the forced migration of professors and their curricula onto online learning platforms. Quantitative research was conducted in the form of a domestically focused survey to determine the success of those teaching models and the transition to online education by focusing on the experience of educators. This paper ultimately argues that under the specter of a pandemic, the ensuing online education has been as successful as possible, and that despite a myriad of global negative impacts, COVID-19 has opened the door to reform traditional learning, allowing educators to take advantage of this golden opportunity to unlock the power of online education.

Above is the abstract pulled from my first ever research paper: What does effective education look like in the context of COVID-19, and how can subsequent successes and challenges be measured in order to ensure the future of online learning and the educa- tors that make it possible?

I conducted the research (read at least three dozen of other educational peer reviewed papers, designing my own survey, sending survey out to thousands of professors teaching domestically) over this past summer as part of Georgia Tech’s Educational Technology Course. Essentially, I wanted to identify the “best practices” of teaching in the midst of COVID19 and compare them against what was really happening: chaos.

For the survey, I was able to collect responses from 500+ professors teaching at universities including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech University, University of Washington and much more¹.

Surveyed professors teaching at schools including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Georgia Tech University, University of California Berkeley

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August 21, 2020