Requirements

You need to generate a technical paper (3-4 pages, plus bibliography) on one of the topics listed below. The choice of topic is yours. For the paper, you need to find at least 4 references to published research papers or other articles. Your paper needs to briefly summarize the articles that you reference, and also answer the questions listed below.

Topics

• DCE (Distributed Computing Environment)
• CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture)
• Sun's Jini system
• Plan 9 OS
• MacOS 10
• Solaris's door mechanism
• The SMB and CIFS protocols: describe, compare etc.
• Process checkpointing
• Gibabit ethernet
• The Condor system
• NUMA vs. UMA multi-processor shared memory systems (cache schemes, memory bandwidth issues)
• COMA (Cache Only Memory Architecture)
• ssh (The Secure Shell)
• Kerberos
• Technical aspects of stack smashing and/or buffer overflows
• Zero-copy TCP implementations
• Logging/Journaling filesystems (compared to "regular" filesystems)
• Any other OS topic (check with me first though)

Questions to answer

In the following, ``it'' refers to the topic that you've chosen to write about.

• What is it?
• When did it first come about? (invented/discovered/used etc.)
• What thing covered in class is it most similar to? In what ways does it differ from this thing?
• Discuss any other systems/schemes that are similar to it.
• Do you think that it is something that is going to increase in popularity in the future? (Base this both on the research that you did, and also your own personal knowledge of this topic, if you have any.)

Note that it should be an essay that you write, using these questions to guide the sorts of things that you write about.