Name – Aditya Vavre
Course Name – Topics in Virtualization and Cloud Computing
Course Code – CS695
Academic Year – 2019-2020
Semester – Spring (6th Semester)
Course Instructor – Mythili Vutukuru
Motivation: This course deals with the concepts of virtualization, so one will be able to understand how exactly applications like VirtualBox work. It also covers details on cloud computing which people use almost everyday while using the internet, and how virtualization has enabled the latest technologies in cloud computing.
Prerequisite: A previous course on operating systems (CS347/CS333 for UGs, CS744 for PGs) is a hard prerequisite. The course also involves significant hands-on programming, so an interest and aptitude for systems programming is highly desirable.
Course-content: The course covers virtualization paradigms of full virtualization, para virtualization, and hardware-assisted virtualization, for CPU, memory, and I/O. It also covers containers and related concepts. Other topics may be covered depending on the timeline. In our course offering the course could not be completed because of the covid pandemic.
Lectures: Attending the lectures is highly recommended because all the concepts are clearly explained in the class on the white board, and even though there are class notes available online, they are not easily readable unless you have attended the lecture and have knowledge of some basic concepts beforehand. The best way to go about this course is to attend all lectures, go through the reference papers, and then refer to the notes available online for a revision before the exams.
Labs: (Teams info) No lab for this course.
Project: There is no project related to this course, neither compulsory or optional.
Assignments: In our course offering, the course had three programming assignments that required knowledge in systems programming. The programming assignments in the course are designed to reinforce the concepts learnt in class. Enough time and resources are given to solve the assignments and each assignment has to be done individually. Grading of the assignments involved a demo and viva with the TAs.
Exams: In our course offering, there were weekly online 10 minute quizzes on Moodle that involved solving MCQs and contributed to 10% of the final grade. There was a mid-semester exam and an end-semester exam that contributed to 20% and 30% of the final grade respectively. And finally, the three programming assignments contributed to 40% of the final grade.
Difficulty: In our course offering we only had a chance to write the mid-semester exam which was not very difficult if one has understood all the concepts well and gone through the reference papers and reading material suggested by the professor on the course web-page. The exam mostly consisted of short answer questions which were very specific and required a single clear answer, otherwise no marks were awarded. The assignments were quite easy but a little time consuming.
Grading: In our offering of the course, the S/FF grading scheme was chosen.
References:
Advanced courses:
Department Academic Mentorship Programme 