Operating Systems

OSTEP ("oh step"), or the "the comet book", represents the culmination of years of teaching intro to operating systems to both undergraduates and graduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Computer Sciences department for nearly 20 years.The book is organized around three concepts fundamental to OS construction: virtualization (of CPU and memory), concurrency (locks and condition variables), and persistence (disks, RAIDS, and file systems).The material, if combined with serious project work and homeworks, will lead students to a deeper understanding and appreciation of modern OSes.The authors, Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, are both professors of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They have been doing research in computer systems for over 20 years, working together since their first graduate operating systems class at U.C. Berkeley in 1993.Since that time, they have published over 100 papers on the performance and reliability of many aspects of modern computer systems, with a special focus on file and storage systems. Their work has been recognized with numerous best-paper awards, and some of their innovations can be found in the Linux and BSD operating systems today.

Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau is the Grace Wahba professor and Chair of Computer Sciences at UW-Madison. He co-leads a research group with Professor Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau. Together, they have graduated 24 Ph.D. students and won numerous best-paper awards; many of their innovations are used by commercial systems. For their work, Andrea and Remzi received the 2018 ACM-SIGOPS Mark Weiser award for "outstanding leadership, innovation, and impact in storage and computer systems research." Remzi has won the SACM Professor-of-the-Year award six times, the Rosner "Excellent Educator" award, and the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award. Andrea and Remzi's operating systems book (OSTEP) is downloaded millions of times yearly and used at hundreds of institutions worldwide. Professor Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau works in the area of computer systems; she has primarily focused on file and storage systems, but has also made significant contributions in distributed systems, virtualization, and scheduling. Andrea has been a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison since January, 2000. In that time, she has won eleven best-paper awards and, according to csrankings.org, has published the third-most papers in the premier systems conferences (SOSP and OSDI) and the most at the top file and storage conference (FAST). In 2018, Andrea and her colleague and husband, Remzi, received the highest honor in the field of systems, the SIGOPS Mark Weiser award for "outstanding leadership, innovation, and impact in storage and computer systems research". Andrea has co-advised 23 Ph.D. students from UW-Madison and has co-chaired USENIX ATC '04, FAST '07, and OSDI’18. Finally, Andrea cares deeply about education and outreach: she has helped hundreds of UW-Madison undergraduate and graduate students connect with thousands of children in the Madison community through weekly after-school CS Clubs. For this work, she was awarded the UW-Madison Van Hise Outreach Teaching Award in 2017.