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CS 6210 - AOS

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I wrapped up CS 6210: Advanced Operating Systems recently — and I genuinely loved it. While not as intense or brutal as CS 7210 (Distributed Computing), this course still packs a punch, just in a very different way.

Where CS 7210 is all about large-scale distributed correctness and fault tolerance, CS 6210 dives deep into the low-level optimizations that make systems fast, efficient, and scalable. Think thread scheduling, memory management, barrier synchronization, RPC internals, etc.

The Projects: The Real Highlight

The absolute best part of this course was the projects. Not as soul-crushing as DC’s DSLabs, but still challenging and extremely rewarding if you put in the time. All four were systems-level implementations, and each gave a taste of how real-world OS components work under the hood.

  1. Virtual Machine Scheduling in KVM
    You’re given a weird low-level API to interact with running VMs, and your job is to monitor things like memory pressure and schedule VMs so they don’t crash. It was awkward at first, but it felt awesome once it clicked.

  2. Barrier Synchronization (OpenMP/MPI)
    You implement and evaluate different barrier synchronization algorithms. There’s some freedom to choose which ones to explore, and you use OpenMP and MPI to implement them. If you like parallel programming, you’ll enjoy this.

  3. Distributed Service using gRPC
    This was a really fun one — you implement a mock Amazon-style store. Clients query your service, which then reaches out to multiple vendor services (via gRPC) and returns the best bid. You build multithreaded servers and manage communication using a thread pool. Felt very practical and modern.

  4. MapReduce Implementation
    Everyone’s favorite intro to distributed data processing. Building MapReduce from scratch gives you insight into why it works so well for large-scale batch jobs. A nice capstone that tied together concurrency and distributed thinking.

The Readings: All 46 of Them

Okay — the real challenge of this course wasn’t the projects. It was the paper readings. There are 46 papers assigned throughout the semester.

You're not expected to deep-read every single one, but you do have to:

  • Submit detailed reviews for two papers,

  • And have at least skimmed the rest well enough for exams.

Topics include everything from CDNs, distributed file systems, barrier synchronization, to Exokernels, MapReduce, global memory systems, and scheduling policies. You'll read classics like Xen and the Art of Virtualization, Lightweight RPC, and Spin: An Extensible Operating System.

The Lectures: Low-Level Systems Wizardry

The lectures cover a massive range of advanced OS topics — often with a deep focus on low-level performance optimizations.

Highlights include:

  • Active networks & lightweight RPC

  • Barrier synchronization and MPI/OpenMP

  • Distributed shared memory

  • CDNs, distributed file systems

  • Memory management in VM environments

  • System scheduling, thread priorities, CPU management

  • Exokernel and user-level device access

  • Direct memory writes to avoid user/kernel context switches

  • gRPC performance hacks

  • MapReduce internals

If you're the kind of person who geeks out over avoiding memory copies or minimizing syscalls — this is your course.

Final Thoughts

CS 6210 is not as intense as CS 7210, but it's still a heavy-hitter in its own way. The projects are highly practical, and the readings give you deep insights into the design of real-world systems. The course teaches you how small, low-level optimizations can lead to massive performance gains — something we often overlook when building software at a higher level.

Highly recommended if you want to understand the guts of the OS, or just become a better systems programmer.