Carl Erickson - US grants

The study of operating systems requires an understanding of some of the fundamental concepts in computer science: concurrency, synchronization, deadlock, communication, and efficiency. The traditional method of lecture and reading does a disservice to students who are being exposed to these difficult concepts for the first time. Undergraduate computer science students need creative, innovative ways of learning these concepts in the context of the operating systems course. The future of computing is in distributed and parallel processing. The operating systems course is the best place to assure every computer science student receives a solid foundation in these fundamental concepts.The EOS operating system lab is designed to increase the number of ways a student has to learn major operating systems principles. Computer laboratory exercises actively involve students with concept- relevant programming and graphical simulations. The ease-of-use and graphical output of the lab applications encourage exploration of operating system subject matter and allow for a more effective teaching mode; that of directed discovery learning. The exercises developed for the EOS lab provide a high learning to coding ratio for programming assignments, and elucidate fundamental computer science concepts in an exciting, interactive manner through simulation. Assignments associated with the subject content of each lab are performed on the workstation and are submitted and graded through electronic mail.

The intent of this project is to equip a laboratory in which students in networking courses can complete exercises and perform experiments that enhance the classroom learning occurring through lectures and discussions. This laboratory is being used as a facility for developing and refining a set of appropriate exercises and experiments which may then be shared with computer science teachers at the undergraduate level. Networking is assuming an increasingly central role in computing. Distributed systems are displacing centralized computing facilities. This paradigm shift has no greater impact on the curriculum than in the area of data communications and networking. The change from a world of minis and mainframes to workstations, LANs, and WANs must be reflected in the computer science curriculum. The new lab addresses both the hardware and the software aspects of this change. As a consequence of this shift, employers have an increased need for and a high expectation of networking expertise on the part of the students that they hire. Also, coursework and research at the graduate level are increasingly devoted to networks and distributed systems. The lab provides the students with concrete examples of things discussed conceptually in the lecture. The students also gain valuable familiarity with hardware and software products that they may be working with in their future careers or research situations.

Computer architecture has been typically taught from a CPU-centric, depth-over-breadth, context-free perspective. The efficacy of this approach for computer science and software- engineering majors seems questionable. We will develop a laboratory curriculum for computer architecture which places the ideas of computer architecture in a systems context, emphasizing applications where knowledge of architecture is essential for software and system development. The areas on which we will focus our new computer systems architecture course are architectural subsystems (CPU, memory, I/O), performance evaluation, parallel architectures, and high performance computing. We will use simulations and experiments as a means of teaching concepts, as well as important activities in themselves. We will develop fourteen laboratory exercises. A shared-memory multiprocessor will enable the study of modern architectural subsystems, support experimental performance evaluation including benchmarking, and teach an introduction to software development on a commercially common multiprocessor. Other labs will use performance monitoring and simulation software to study architectural subsystems, their interaction, and their impact on performance. Commercial software to support the network of workstations computing model will give students insights into parallel processing. A short and basic introduction to logic gates and circuits with accompanying breadboard laboratory will de-mystify the computing elements of modern computers. The evaluation plan for our project includes a longitudinal study to assess student change in attitude towards computer architecture, and a second study to measure the efficacy of our laboratory based curriculum on student's knowledge of fundamental computer architecture concepts.