CIS-332 -<li>Project


CIS332-004, CIS 332-104 (Spring 1996)
PRINCIPLES OF OPERATING SYSTEMS

Professor: Franz J. Kurfess

Home page:http://www.cis.njit.edu/franz   E-mail:franz@cis.njit.edu

Project CIS 332

One of your assignments for the course is a project, contributing 30% to your overall grade. For your project, you can choose between three options:

a research paper
an implementation in Ada
construction of a World Wide Web page

These three options are described in more detail below. There is actually a forth option, community service. Those of you interested in that option should already have contacted the Office of Community and Public Service; please follow the deadlines and format for the research paper.

You have to submit the project in two stages: first a short outline in which you describe the structure of your paper / program / Web page(s), and then the final version, which is the full paper, complete program, or complete set of Web pages.

The deadlines are

Thursday, March 21, 1996 for the outline
Thursday, April 18, 1996 for the final version

Research Paper:

For this research paper, you have to demonstrate the ability to read an article from a professional research journal (like IEEE Computer or Communications of the ACM), describe its main ideas in your own words, and use the knowledge you acquired in class. The task is to read the paper "An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents" by Nancy G. Leveson and Clark S. Turner, IEEE Computer July 1993, pages 18-41, and write a research paper on the issues relevant to the topics discussed in class. A copy of the article can be found in the library (CIS 332 / Kurfess).

Your paper should be 7-10 pages long; however, it is not the number of pages that makes a good paper but the contents. My evaluation will be based on the following criteria:

coverage of relevant topics
presentation and readability
originality
bibliography

Some hints:

Try to describe things in your own words. Parts of your paper which are practically identical to your source will not count, and you risk a bad grade for extensive copying.
Have discussions with your fellow students about the paper. You will have to write your own paper, however.
Use a spellchecker or ask somebody to go over your paper to eliminate the worst mistakes. Whereas grammar and spelling are not taken into account for your grade, it might leave a bad impression or make your paper difficult to understand if there are many mistakes.
Try to find additional sources of information, e.g the textbook or other journal articles. Don't forget to list them in the bibliography section!

Here is an example for the structure of such a paper:

Title Page
	(Author, Title, Affiliation)
Introduction
	(background, history, problem description, overview of the systems)
Main Part
	relevant issues for operating systems
	relation operating systems - medical device (Therac-25)
Conclusion
	(advantages, problems, future developments)
Bibliography
        (cite all articles and books you have used, including the textbook)

Possible questions for students:

Which software engineering and safety principles were violated?
Try to find other instances where computer systems were involved in accidents.
Why is it frequently difficult to analyse such incidents?
How can such accidents be prevented?
What type of operating system was used?
How is the scheduling between different tasks done?
How was synchronization between tasks achieved?
What are "race conditions"?
Why are diagnoses like "human error", "computer error" not very meaningful?
Why are independent safety features necessary for such devices?
What are important sources of potential problems?

Ada Implementation

Your task here is to implement the Dining Philosophers problem in Ada, based on the pseudocode given in the textbook on page 194. You should use the Ada task constructs and the Ada rendezvous between tasks for the required synchronization between the philosophers.

Most of this implementation is fairly straightforward, you simply have to convert the code into the corresponding Ada constructs. Note, however, that there are a few cases where this conversion is not immediately obvious; you might have to define some data structures and functions of your own.

World Wide Web Page

In this case, you have to put together material about one particular operating system of your choice (e.g. Unix, VMS, DOS, Windows, MacOS) and arrange it into a collection of WWW pages, reflecting the topics discussed in class, and how "your" operating system tackles these issues. This option can also be solved as a team effort; if you want to work as a group on it, please talk to me first and get my approval.

World Wide Web Hints

Where to find further information, e.g. how to install your own home page on the hertz system.