Assessment

By written examination 90% and coursework 10%.
Here are some CS exam papers from previous years: 2016, 2017, 2018 (shorter paper because of strike action), 2019 (note the new format).
Here is a Mock exam.

Textbook

W. Stallings, Operating Systems, Internals and Design Principles, Prentice Hall.
Latest edition is 9th edition (2018). (Earlier editions could do as well, but section numbering may be different.)
See the website of the book for additional resources.

Recommended Reading

• W. Stallings, Computer Organization and Architecture: Designing for Performance, Prentice Hall.
  Latest edition is 10th edition (2016). (Earlier editions could do as well, but section numbering may be different.)
• A.S. Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems, Prentice Hall, 2nd edition (2001), or later.

Coursework

Submit your coursework in .pdf or .doc format via the Moodle page of the module (do not forget to press the submit button). If this fails for some reason, then email it to the TA at manni@dcs.bbk.ac.uk.

• Part 1: To be announced (by 3 February 2020). Part 1. The deadline is 23:55, 23 February 2020.
• Part 2: To be announced (by 16 March 2020). The deadline is 23:55, 5 April 2020.

The cut-off date for all submissions is ten working days after the initial deadline. Submissions after the deadline but before the cut-off date will be capped at 50% of marks (unless there are accepted mitigating circumstances). Submissions after the cut-off date will get 0 (zero) mark.
By submitting the coursework

• you implicitly acknowledge that you have read and understood the sections on plagiarism in College Policy on Assessment Offences,
• you confirm that the work is your own and
• you give permission for your work to be submitted to the plagiarism-testing database used by the College.

Course Outline

Introduction: Computer architecture (CA) and Operating system (OS) overview
Processors
Processes and threads
Concurrency
Memory management
I/O and file systems
Protection and security
Distributed and parallel processing

Lectures and Slides* (subject to regular update)

• Week 1. Introduction to Computer architecture slides.
• Week 2. Introduction to Operating systems slides.
  
• Week 3. Problem-solving session. Please try to solve these problems before the session: CA problems (with solutions) and OS problems.
  You may want to test your knowledge of the basics of CA and OS by having a go at this quiz.
  
• Week 4. Instruction sets and processor structure slides.
  Here is a sample Instruction Set Architecture ISA and some pipeline (some possible solutions SEIA, SEMA, EIA, EMA, CE) and branching (with solution) problems.
  CPU simulator CPUsim and some assembly programs (written by Anna Taylor). You can download the simulator from CPUsim java program and the user manual from user manual.
  
• Week 5. Reduced instruction set computers (RISC) and Superscalar processors slides, and SPARC instruction set.
  Instruction-level parallelism problems: simple pipelined vs superscalar (with solution) and superscalar (with solution).
  
• Week 6. Reading week.
  Deadline for coursework Part 1!
  
• Week 7. Processes and threads slides and a problem.
  Scheduling slides and examples.
  A good introduction to multi-, super- and hyperthreading.
• Week 8 and 9. Concurrency slides and animations (written by Vygintas Ranonis). Is Tanenbaum's code deadlock- and starvation free? Another soultion of the dining philosophers problem: Java program from Silberschatz et al. An additional document on Showing concurrent properties.
• Week 10. Memory management slides, MM in Unix and in Win2000. And some exercises.
• Week 11. Input/Output slides. A note on Hamming code and a wikipedia article.
  File systems slides. Examples.
  
• Revision lecture. Main points of the module.

* The slides were prepared by using Patricia Roy's slides for the textbook, Adrian J Pullin's slides for Computer Organization and Architecture, and the slides accompanying Modern Operating Systems.