CS 574: Final Exam Topics

The Final Exam will be Friday, December 11, at 1:00 PM, in SH 115. Please remember the following:

• The exam will be open book/open notes. You may bring any paper reference material you wish — your notes from class, printed copies of my web notes, any books you want, etc. However, you may not use any electronic aids whatever: no computer, no PDA, no calculator, and (especially!) no cell phone.

  Something some students have found useful on occasion (in several different classes, not just this one) has been to generate templates to fill in with the solutions to problems they anticipate being on the exam. This can be very helpful, and is perfectly legitimate.

• Bring your own paper.
• In order to provide anonymous grading, you need to put your Banner ID on each sheet of paper you turn in. Hint: some students have found it useful in the past to print off ten pages or so of paper with their Banner ID on it already.
• Also, you need to start each problem on a new sheet of paper.
• Finally, remember that every question has an implicit "why?". If I ask a true/false question and your answer is the single word "true", it's wrong. It's the reasoning I'm looking for here.

The Final will be a comprehensive exam, covering material from throughout the semester. Only material appearing in papers presented in class will be explicitly covered on the exam; however, background material may be assumed.

Note: I'm likely to try to come up with questions that try to combine multiple topics, such as appropriate protocols for distributed filesystems or matching information from the two halves of the semester.

1. Everything From the First Half of the Semester
2. Interprocess Communication
   • D-Bus, AJAX
3. Memory Consistency
   1. Models
   2. Protocols
   3. LimitLESS, LRC
4. Distributed Filesystems
   • NFS, Coda, PVFS, Oceanstore
5. Data Integrity and Security
   • CRC, RSA, SSH

Last modified: Fri Dec 4 14:24:00 MST 2009