Operating System Trade-Offs: Performance, Extensibility, and Security Systems need to balance how much extensibility, safety, and performance they provide applications. This is one of the fundamental trade-offs in system design. The goal of this seminar is to make you a better systems builder, paper reader, and systems researcher, by identifying this trade-off in various settings and thinking of ways to subsume it.
A 10-week, expert-led virtual seminar for professional engineers to engage deeply with foundational and contemporary research. Register for Fall ‘25 Seminar Performance, Extensibility, and Security Trade-Offs in Operating Systems Subscribe to be notified of upcoming sessions. Seminar Overview This program provides a structured environment for practicing engineers to explore a specific topic in computer systems. Each seminar is designed as a deep dive, moving from foundational papers to cutting-edge research.
This seminar explores the evolution of software systems that treat an entire datacenter as a single, powerful computer. Over the past two decades, a revolution in systems design has moved us away from managing individual servers to orchestrating vast fleets of machines with sophisticated software control planes. Understanding this journey is critical for any practitioner building or operating modern cloud-native applications, as the abstractions developed during this era—from distributed file systems to serverless functions—are the foundation of the cloud.