CSCI340 Inquiry Based Final Project

Goals

This project has the following goals:

• Student sets out to answer a question about a topic related to Operating Systems.
• Students devise a way to test and/or gain understanding about the question they are trying to ask through a hands on implementation of the concept.
  • Should come up with a procedure or method for testing the effectiveness of known solutions or their solutions.
• Students write up a document with their findings

Sample Questions

Recommended questions, you are welcome to propose a different one but these are pre-approved, if you want to answer a different question you need to get approval so email me with your question and how you plan to test it:

• How does the performance of threads in C compare to one of the following languages?
  • Python (multi-process)
  • Rust
  • Go
  • Java
  • Other (get approval)
• What file system performs best for small files on Linux? Or alternatively what about for large files? (using dd for benchmarks, don't use IOzone or bonnie++)
  • Consider at least 5 of the following filesystems:
    • ext4
    • ext2
    • xfs
    • FAT32
    • ZFS
    • BTRFS
    • NTFS (might be CIFS under linux)
• How does the performance of differing IPC mechanisms compare in C to one of the following languages?
  • Python
  • Rust
  • Go
  • Java
  • Other (get approval)
• As an Extra Credit question: How much does Docker virtualization impact the performance of threads compared to a native system in one of the following languages?
  • C
  • Python
  • Rust
  • Go
  • Java
  • Other (get approval)

Evaluation

Your project will be graded based on the following components.

• Paper - You will submit a short paper describing the following:
  • What is your question
  • Your experimental setup (machine, etc)
    • Are there any side effects or artifacts related to your experimental setup that might impact your results?
  • How you ran your tests to answer your question
  • Test results:
    • How accurate are they?
      • Make sure you run enough tests that your results are accurate enough.
    • Do you have variation in your test code?
      • DNS threads, matrix multiplication threads, other threaded applications?
      • Variations in block and file sizes?
      • Variations in size of data sent via IPC?
  • Your conclusion/answer to the question
  • What you learned from answering the question
• Code - You must submit the code for your project along with the paper submission.

Project Submission

You will submit a tar.gz to INGInious system, the tar.gz should have the following:

• PDF of your paper that discusses your results, analysis, motivation, conclusions, etc.
• All of the code for you used for your project.
  • Alternatively you can add me to a repository with all your code for the project, and just put a README in the tar.gz with the link to this repository.

Extra Credit

You can get an additional 10 points of extra credit for every additional question you answer.