CS 135, Spring 2010
File Systems

Quick index:

CS135 is a course in file systems, with an emphasis on current research directions. It will be taught in the manner of a graduate seminar, with much of the material selected by and presented by the students. There will be relatively little emphasis on homework and programming, although you will be implementing a file system of your own.

Resources

There are many places to find papers on file systems. This list highlights a few sources, but is hardly exhaustive.

Conferences

A quick directory of conferences useful in finding file-system papers:

FAST (File and Storage Technologies)
SOSP (Symposium on Operating Systems Principles): 2009, 2007, 2005, 2003, 2001, 1999, 1997.
OSDI (Operating Systems Design and Implementation)
Usenix (Usenix Annual Technical Conference)
IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MassStor)
ACM SIGMOD
VLDB

There are many more conferences than these, so feel free to look more broadly.

Journals

Journals that have file systems papers:

ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS)
Communications of the ACM (older issues)
IEEE Computer (older issues)
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
IEEE Transactions on Computers (sometimes)
Software—Practice and Experience

Bibliographies

A number of people have created bibliographies of file-system-related papers. Some of them are even fairly up to date.

Citeseer is one of the best places to search out CS papers.
Ron Oldfield's parallel I/O bibliography.
Bibliography on distributed file systems.
Large archive storage systems bibliography.
Francisco Rosales's somewhat outdated bibliography.

Grading Criteria

NOTE: The following grading proportions are tentative. In particular, the homework portion of the grade may change as the homework is developed.

The class grading will be based on participation (10%), homework (20%), and a final project (70%). The project grading will be broken down as follows:

Project proposal: 5% of course grade. Criteria are completeness of the proposal and general writing quality.
Preliminary report: 10%. Criteria are writing quality, completeness of the report, and progress toward the goal.
Draft of final report: 10%. Criteria are completeness and writing quality.
In-class presentation: 10%. Criteria are completeness and quality.
Final report: 35%. Criteria are overall project quality and writing quality.