This course is about real computer systems, and the principles on which they are designed and built. We cover both modern OSes and the large-scale distributed systems that power today's online services. We illustrate the ideas with real-world examples, but emphasize common theoretical results, practical tradeoffs, and design principles that apply across many different scales and technologies.

The seminar covers recent results in the increasingly important field of computing technologies’ impact on our environment. We will learn the impact of device manufacturing, energy consumption, and the role that workloads have. Most importantly, we will discuss what can be done to address this environmental impact.

The seminar will cover topics related to data processing using new hardware in general and hardware accelerators (GPU, FPGA, specialized processors) in particular.