Course Catalog URL
Identifier
COMS 3520
Professor(s)
Last Updated: Spring 2025
Offered during Fall and Spring Semesters each year.
- Credits and contact hours: 3 credits, 4 contact hours
- Text book, title, author, and year: Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau.
- Other supplemental materials: None
Specific course information
- Brief description of the content of the course: This course introduces the internal operation of operating systems. In particular, the course covers the role of operating systems, processes, CPU scheduling, threads, synchronization, deadlocks, memory management and file systems. It also covers related topics in security, protection, networking and distributed systems.
- Prerequisites or co-requisites: COMS 3210 or CPRE 3810, COMS 3270 or CPRE 2880, ENGL 2500
- Required, elective, or selected elective? Required
Specific goals for the course
- Specific outcomes of instruction:
- An ability to design, implement, and evaluate a computer-based system, process, component, or program to meet desired needs. (2)
- An ability to engage in continuing professional development.
- An ability to apply design and development principles in construction of software systems of varying complexity. (6)
Brief list of topics to be covered
- Overview of Operating Systems
- Processes
- Threads and concurrency
- CPU Scheduling
- Synchronization
- Deadlocks
- Main Processes
- Memory
- Virtual Memory
- File-Systems
- Protection and Security
- Foundational concepts in security
- Authentication and authorization, access control
- Web security, platform security
- Threats and attacks, denial of service
- Networking and Communications
- Network terminology
- Applications such as client/server, peer-to-peer, cloud, etc.
- Distributed Systems
- Distributed concurrency and atomicity
- Need for resource allocation
- Deadlock, starvation
- Mutual exclusion, race conditions, semaphores