The final exam is Monday, May 2, 9AM - noon, in D106 LSRC.
About the CPS 110 final exam
- The exam is cumulative.
- Closed book: no notes or electronics, except the standard allowance for one
page of notes.
- There will be at least one synchronization problem.
- Questions about the projects are also in scope.
- Older exams are posted in the archive.
- Slides from Landon Cox, also posted on the course calendar, may be helpful but will not
be tested unless they were also included in my slides.
- In general, all my exams attempt to test mastery of high-level
concepts, and related insights. If you are losing yourself in the details, focus on key
concepts. I do not test machine-specific detail or
language-specific detail (e.g., APIs, address space layouts, etc.)
- For each concept or mechanism that is in scope, you should understand its
motivation, vocabulary, limitations, and the key enabling idea(s).
If you get all that, you'll be OK.
- Please understand that the exam will not attempt to test your
programming skills. On any programming problem, I am just trying to
test your ability to do synchronization. I don't care if the code
would compile, or if it is legal C++ or any other language, or if
you have your semicolons in the right place, or any of the rest of
it. Concurrency problems ask you to write procedures for a
multi-threaded data structure or higher-level synchronization
construct. Just give me the procedures: don't write a main() or
code that creates the threads that calls the procedures, etc.
- In class, I said the exam would include short-form questions like
multiple choice or true/false, to make it easier to grade since I
was planning to be in court. But the case was dropped during the trial, so that is no longer true.
In Scope and Fair Game
- Any material is in scope if it was in my slides AND discussed in
class, with some exclusions listed below.
- Questions about your team's solutions for the projects are in
scope!
- Back-of-napkin performance graphs are in scope!
- Behavior of scheduling algorithms listed on the midterm are in
scope! Even multi-level feedback queues.
- Thread trajectory graphs ("RTG") to illustrate locking, starvation, and deadlock.
- Server structuring alternatives, including BuggyServer (but not SEDA).
- Basic disk performance behavior: seek time, rotational delay,
importance of block transfer size and sequential access.
- Queuing Theory for Busy People: including Cumulative
Distribution Functions and response time quantiles, and why averages
can lead you astray. Note: I added two new slides to 17-servers to
clarify these concepts.
- Optional problem sets on the web site are in scope!
- Synchronization problems on the web site are in scope!
- What happens when you click on a Web link, including https.
- Problems that appeared on the midterm and concurrency quiz are
fair game! (Except "Gated Community"). Read my rant
and the midterm
solutions [PDF].
- For RAID, understand the basics of striping (RAID 0), mirroring
(RAID 1), parity, and the difference between RAID 4 and RAID 5. In
particular, you should understand the pros and cons of each of those
four with respect
to performance, capacity, and reliability.
- Distributed systems: in particular understand RPC,
concepts of failure models (fail stop vs. Byzantine), the network partition
problem ("split brain"), leased locks, consensus safety and
liveness, consistency, and availability.
- Cryptosystems: understand the advantages, limitations, and uses of
symmetric crypto, asymmetric crypto, hashing, signing, certificates,
nonces.
Exclusions
- Material on energy (4/25) was not posted and will not be tested.
- Distributed systems material from 4/20 is in scope, except any
details of the consensus algorithms, justifications of the consensus
results (e.g., FLP), or details of consistency ("Getting precise
about CAP #1"). The cloud coordination services (Chubby, Centrifuge,
Zookeeper) were not discussed and will not be tested.
- On April 18 (22-secdist), material after slide #42 was not
covered: authorization, capabilities, access control lists,
Kerberos, etc. Trusted Platform Module is also excluded.
- ARP poisoning attacks and DNS spoofing attacks are excluded.
- Material related to NFS write performance (Chet Juszczak
memorial) on April 11 is excluded.
- Guest lectures are excluded, unless I also presented the
material.
- From April 6: WAFL, FlexVol ("Volume Virtualization"), snapshots, and log checkpoint/truncate are
excluded.
- RAID 2, 3, 6, 5+0 are excluded.
- Any slide marked "Not to be tested" or "Provided for
completeness" is excluded.
- Layout/allocation policies for FFS or other file systems are excluded, but understand
WHY they exist.
- Material related to SEDA server architecture is excluded.
- Banker's algorithm is excluded.
