George Mason University
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

CS 571 Operating Systems - Spring 2004

Tuesday 4.30 - 7.10 P.M.
Innovation Hall Rm. 206


Instructor: Dr. Hakan Aydin



Description: This course covers the principles of operating systems theory and practice. Fundamental concepts such as processes, synchronization, scheduling and memory management will be presented. Another emphasis will be on the principles of distributed operating systems.

Prerequisites: CS 310 and CS 365, or equivalent. A solid background in Computer Architecture is required. In order to be able to work on the programming projects, the students must be comfortable with C/C++ or Java programming languages.

Readings:
Required Textbook: "Operating System Concepts", by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne (6th Edition, John Wiley & Sons 2003, ISBN 0-471-25060-0).
"Modern Operating Systems" (2nd edition, Prentice Hall 2001, ISBN: 0-13-031358-0), by A. S. Tanenbaum is another good book on the principles of operating systems.
As additional reference on distributed systems, the following book can be recommended: "Distributed Systems: Concept and Design" (3rd Edition, Addison-Wesley 2001, ISBN 0201-619-180), by Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg.

Office Hours: Tuesday: 7.20 PM - 8.20 PM, Wednesday: 7.20 PM - 8.20 PM, and by appointment (Office: ST II, Room 401)

Topics: Tentative Exam Schedule: Grading: The students must achieve a total score of at least 85 (out of 100) to be considered for an A. No early exams will be given and make-up exams are strongly discouraged.
GMU Honor Code will be enforced. The students are supposed to work individually on the assignments/projects. Collaboration will be allowed only for the group projects, within each group. We reserve the right to use MOSS to detect plagiarism. Violations of GMU Honor Code or a total score of 49 (or less) will result in an F.

TA: Shen-Shyang Ho (sho@cs.gmu.edu)
TA Office Hours: Monday 5.30 PM - 7.30 PM, Tuesday 2.00 PM - 4.00 PM (ST II, Room 435)

Computer Accounts: Any student who is planning to work on IT&E lab computers for programming projects should obtain an account (Information here)

Course Web Page: http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~aydin/cs571