omscs foundational courses

omscs foundational courses: Luckily, there was some overlap between the two classes. After becoming a full-time student, my schedule was a breeze to absorb the kind of “presumed knowledge” that Advanced Operating Systems (AOS) believed was running around my brain. There’s an additional “refresher” course that I strongly suggest taking if you’re bringing this course with no GIOS. It can be completed within a weekend, as well, and it’s the beginning, of course, a great time to squeeze this into. The process of reviewing this refresher and working on the areas where I was weak also had the benefit of forcing me to study subjects that put me ahead of my peers in some areas of GIOS, however not too numerous to make the course unnecessary.

Like GIOS, The instructor ( Umakishore Ramachandran) gave excellent lectures, with the course well-structured, but was primarily absent from managing the day-to-day activities of the class. While the TA’s of this course was not as active as those in GIOS, they could deal with all forum queries and be easily accessible in Slack. Four projects are included (an exercise for the final assignment) and two exams. The projects can be managed for those with C/C++ proficiency. In addition, I discovered the test more accessible than the ones in GIOS (more memorization for these tests and less application of concepts).

As many reviews of CS6210 in OMSCentral indicate, it is the closest thing to an open-source course within OMSCS, and the content reflects the same. Most of the course focuses on virtualization and distributed communication/resource sharing, all in the context of operating systems developed in the last 30-40 years. There’s an overwhelming number of assignments (about 45 in total, every one averaging between 20 and 25 pages), and it’s not difficult to question the effectiveness of reading papers published in 1978, but it’s definitely worth the effort. In many ways, it’s the case for computers. Each piece is packed with nuggets and excellence from various computer systems that represent fundamental concepts and truisms that have been tested over time.