Overview

This class is about two things. First, it’s about the abstractions of the operating system that sit between your code and the hardware of the computer. Understanding how these features work allows you to make your programs fast and efficient beyond their Big-O runtime.

Second, this class is about critical thinking abd problem solving about practical computer science problems. The engineers who designed the operating systems we use today had to solve hundreds of hard engineering problems that no one had ever solved before. This course is designed to help you gain the problem solving skills necessary to solve hard practical computer science problems. This is directly appicable to three domains:

You will be ready to reason about and design performant software systems, as well as diagnose and solve problems throughout the software stack that supports modern software (the software itself, along with its libraries, operating system, computer hardware, and how those pieces interact).
You will be ready to decompose and solve the types of questions that are asked in technical interviews at many of the best employers of software engineers.
By practicing technical problem solving within a specific context, you train yourself to better decompose, communicate about, reason about, and solve technical problems more broadly.

In addition to oral and written problem solving exercises, there are also a collection of programming assignments. Completing these assignments will give you experience with the many steps along the path from source code to running program, memory management and virtual memory, process creation, communication and control, and a healthy dose of concurrent programming.

By the end of this course, you will have a good understanding of the main elements that work together to form modern computing environments. You will have acquired some familiarity with standard diagnostic tools, debuggers, dynamic memory allocation, concurrent programming, and file I/O both with physical files and network sockets.

Prerequisites

The main conceptual prerequisites for this class are CS 211 (the C part), CS 261 (machine organization), and CS 251 (data structures). A solid understanding of the theory of how things are stored in the computer, as well as the theory of how a processor executes instructions, as well as a basic understanding of programming (and specifically programming in C) are the tools you’ll need to succeed in this class.

Course Announcements

Whenever possible, course information will be conveyed using this website. Course discussion will happen via Piazza. Course assignments and assignment grades will be collected and returned through Gradescope. We will use Blackboard Collaborate for synchronous class sessions (but might use MS Teams also/instead depending on student preferences). You are responsible for checking this website for the reading schedule and ensuring that you complete all assignments, and keeping up to date on Piazza for any corrections/clarifications regarding assignments or other important information.

Peer Instruction

Typically, this course is taught using Peer Instruction, a teaching model which places stronger emphasis on classroom discussion and student interaction. This doesn’t map so well onto remote instruction, but we will be trying to approximate it the best we can. Typical peer instruction consists of readings before class, a short beginning of class quiz, and a collection of discussion questions during class that you complete by yourself, discuss in small groups, and then discuss with the entire class.

This semester, the intended flow of a week of class is this:

Throughout the week: there will be assigned readings, video lectures, and discussion questions.
Mondays: there is a synchronous, online, required lab session with a short activity and a Gradescope quiz based on that activity that must be completed before the end of the day.
Tuesdays: open Q&A office hours.
Thursdays: content quizzes are due. discussion questions are due. I will go over discussion question answers in class. Discussion questions are loosely based on exam question style, structure, and content.

Like peer instruction, we will still have required readings and required videos. Rather than having a quiz at the beginning of class, there will be a quiz graded for correctness each week based on that content. These will be released on Wednesdays and due at 12:30pm on Thursdays.

Each week there will also be one set of discussion questions. These questions are meant to be considered by yourself, but you are encouraged to discuss the questions in small groups. You must answer these questions on Gradescope as well, but you will only be graded on completeness and effort, not on correctness.

Homework late policy

Every assignment in this course is due at exactly the time stated on Gradescope, and while we will grade late assignments, they earn zero credit.

Gradescope deadlines are precise - an assignment is late if it was turned in one millisecond or one month late.

Gradescope deadlines are universal - you must turn in your code, and it doesn’t matter whether you didn’t turn it in because it wasn’t compiling, or couldn’t upload it to git, or couldn’t upload it to gradescope. You can turn in homework assignments an unlimited number of times, so we recommend that you turn them in early and often.

Because these deadlines are so rigid, by default we will not include your lowest exam, your lowest homework, and your two lowest lab, discussion, and quiz scores in your final grade for the class. The later assignments and exams in the course are more difficult than the earlier ones, and there is no exceptional late policy - we recommend that you do not use these unless you genuinely need to, so that they’re available if unexpected issues come up.

If your lowest exam and/or lowest homework grades are higher than your course average, we will include them in the calculation of your final grade. This means that your lowest exam and lowest homework can’t hurt your final grade, they can only help it, so it will always be worth it to complete every assignment.

Evaluation

Grades are curved based on an aggregate course score. This means that the course score cut-offs for an A, B, C etc. are not defined ahead of time: these will be set after the end of the course. There is no quota for grade assignments, and there will be a hard “ceiling” for the curve of 90/80/70/60 (i.e. the cutoff for an A will never be higher than 90% of all points possible in the course). Each individual quiz/problem set/homework/exam is worth the same as each other quiz/problem set/homework/exam - i.e. each of the 13 reading quizzes is worth 10%/13 ≈ .77% of your final grade.

The course grade weighting is:

Task	% of total grade
Video/reading quizzes (15, lowest two dropped)	10
Class discussion question sets (15, lowest two dropped)	10*
Lab activities (14, lowest two dropped)	10
Homeworks (6, lowest is dropped)	30
Exams (5, lowest is dropped)	40

Class Participation

Class participation is an incredibly important component of this course regardless of whether it is online or in person. Unfortunately, “participation” is very hard to grade. The 10% of your grade that is marked as “participation” is largely an honor system - you aren’t required to get the questions correct or write several paragraph long answers to the discussion questions to get full credit. However, students who meaningfully engage with each other, either through Piazza or during the class discussion sessions can raise their discussion grade up to a maximum of 20/10. Additionally, I will consider high quality discussion question answers for students who are very close to any grade cutoffs at the end of the semester. Submitting bug fixes or providing test cases for homework assignments can also earn extra credit.

Textbook

We will be using Computer Systems, a programmer’s perspective by Randal E. Bryant and David R. O’Hallaron, 3rd edition, as our main textbook. We will be covering the content from Chapter 7 through the remainder of the book.

You may also find The C Programming Language by Kernigan and Ritchie (colloquially referred to as K&R) a helpful reference when writing C programs.

Overcoming challenges enables growth

This is not a lecture-oriented class or one in which mimicking prefabricated examples will lead you to success. You will be expected to work actively to construct your own understanding of the topics at hand, with the readily available help of the instructors and your classmates. Many of the concepts you learn and problems you work will be new to you and ask you to stretch your thinking. You will experience frustration and failure before you experience understanding. This is part of the normal learning process. Your viability as a professional in the modern workforce depends on your ability to embrace this learning process and make it work for you. You are supported on all sides by the professor and your classmates. But no student is exempt from the process and the hard work it entails.

Mental health

We value your mental health and emotional wellness as part of the UIC student experience. The UIC Counseling Center offers an array of services to provide additional support throughout your time at UIC, including workshops, peer support groups, counseling, self-help tools, and initial consultations to speak to a mental health counselor about your concerns. Please visit the Counseling Center website for more information (https://counseling.uic.edu/). Further, if you think emotional concerns may be impacting your academic success, please contact your faculty and academic advisers to create a plan to stay on track.

Student Disabilities

If you have a disability that might impact your performance in this course or otherwise requires special accommodation, please contact me as soon as possible so that appropriate arrangements can be made. Support is available through the Disability Resource Center. You will need to contact them to get your disability documented before accommodations can be made.

Academic Integrity

Consulting with your classmates on assignments is encouraged, except where noted. However, turn-ins are individual, and copying code from your classmates is considered plagiarism. For example, given the question “how did you do X?”, a great response would be “I used function Y, with W as the second argument. I tried Z first, but it didn’t work”. An inappropriate response would be “here is my code, look for yourself”. You should never look at someone else’s code, or show someone else your code. Either of these actions are considered academic dishonesty (cheating) and will be prosecuted as such.

To avoid suspicion of plagiarism, you must specify your sources together with all turned-in materials. List classmates you discussed your homework with and webpages from which you got inspiration. Plagiarism and cheating, as in copying the work of others, paying others to do your work, etc, is obviously prohibited, and will be reported. We will be running MOSS, an automated plagiarism detection tool, on all handins.

There are consequences to cheating on two levels - the consequences for your grade, and the consequences at the university level. Within class, the first time cheating on a programming assignment or problem set will result in a 0 on the assignment. A second time on a programming assignment, or first time on an exam will result in failing the class. Egregious cheating on a programming assignment (including but not limited to purchasing a solution online) is also grounds for failing the class.

I report all suspected academic integrity violations to the dean of students. If it is your first time, the dean of students allows you to informally resolve the case - this means the student agrees that my description of what happened is accurate, and the only repercussions on an institutional level are that it is noted that this happened in your internal, UIC files (i.e. the dean of students can see that this happened, but no professors or other people can, and it is not in your transcript). If this has happened before, in any of your classes, this results in a formal hearing and the dean of students decides on the institutional consequences. After multiple instances of academic integrity violations, students may be suspended or expelled. For all cases, the student has the option to go through a formal hearing if they believe that they did not actually violate the academic integrity policy. If the dean of students agrees that they did not, then I revert their grade back to the original grade, and the matter is resolved.