Week 13 of GIOS

The last couple days leading up to the project deadline always triggers a torrent of messages in the chat rooms (i.e. Slack channel), students frantically scrambling to get their C code to pass the automated testing harness (Bonnie). Fortunately, my design for project — using IPC (inter process communication), message queues and shared memory segments, to communicate between a webproxy and a simple cache — held up pretty well and my C code was able to pass all the tests after two or three failed attempts. What a relief!

So after finishing the project, I’ve redirected my attention to watching the recorded video lectures and reading the prescribed research papers, which cover various topics including RPC (remote procedure calls), DFS (distributed file systems), I/O (input/output) management, virtualization and more.

And I’m pleased to say that I’m learning a ton — most of the concepts I’ve dabbled in a bit but never studied in an academic setting. For example, take RPC. I’ve heard this term casually tossed around in conversations: “Oh yea, this client makes an RPC call to the server.” And I had assumed, for years now, that RPC was a loose term for API calls across the network. But that’s not the case. In fact, RPC is a bundle of technologies and concepts introduced to encourage the development of distributed systems, something not as prevalent in the 1980s.

Anyways, enough blogging and back to work and studying.