CMSC 818I: Recent Topics in Operating Systems Research

Spring 2003: Final Examination
Posted: May 22, 2003, 12:00 PM

For the final exam you will have to write an essay using as a starting point a conference in operating systems held three years ago, namely SOSP'99. The essay has to contain four parts:

• For the first part, you should identify the paper you consider to have been the most influential for the 2002 state of the art in systems (you can use the OSDI papers as a good sample of the currently hot research topics). In the essay you must convincingly motivate your choice and describe how this paper influenced (and could have influenced even more) the current research.
• For the second part, you should identify the paper you consider to have been the least influential for the current systems research. Again, you need to motivate your choice and explain why that paper did not take of, why it was considered relevant then but became less relevant or even irrelevant now.
• For parts three and four of your essay, you have to repeat this exercise using as a starting point the OSDI 2002 conference (papers we discussed, only). You must predict the most and least influential papers from this conference three years from now (by the time of your graduation :-))
• Extra Credit: What happened with the "star" papers (best paper awards) from SOSP'99? Discuss their relevance today. Finally, do you see any SOSP'99 papers to remain relevant three years from now? Elaborate your answer.

Most of the papers (about 17) are available online at http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigops/sosp99/program.html. The set of papers for this essay is limited to the papers that are available from the given URL (papers with broken links are discarded). The essay cannot exceed 8 pages and must be submitted electronically as a pdf file to iftode@cs.umd.edu no later than Friday, May 23, 11:59 AM. The examination is take home but strictly individual. Collaboration and discussions of any kind related to this exam and essay are not permitted until the deadline expires regardless of when your essay was submitted.

Good Luck!