Course Overview

The video lectures in this page have been recorded as part of the NPTEL course Design and Engineering of Computer Systems offered in Spring 2022. The course ``Design and Engineering of Computing Systems'' is also taught as a first-year PG elective at IIT Bombay, with the course code CS744, usually in the Autumn semester. In addition to the NPTEL recorded video lectures, this page also contains some additional reference study material in the form of links to online textbooks/video courses, programming exercises, and practice problems from the course offering at IIT Bombay.

This course is a broad computer systems course covering various aspects of how to design and engineer real-world computer systems. The course cuts across multiple topics such as operating systems, computer networks, computer architecture, virtualization, cloud computing, performance analysis, and distributed systems. The course is accessible to anyone who has a basic introduction to computer programming; no other prior knowledge is assumed. But UG-level knowledge of operating systems and networking will be useful.

The course concepts will be covered in a bottom-up manner, beginning with a discussion of the building blocks of computer systems, and ending with case studies and examples of end-to-end design of real-world computer systems. We start with an overview of computer systems hardware. We then understand how the operating system manages the hardware, and how user applications are built over the operating system. We will also understand how user applications communicate over the Internet. We will then study how a computer system is assembled from various sub-components, using examples from real life. Next, we will learn how to measure the performance of computer systems, and how to optimize for good performance. Finally, we will study some techniques to improve the fault tolerance and reliability of computer systems.

Additional Study Material

Textbooks

• Dive into Systems, by Suzanne J. Matthews, Tia Newhall, and Kevin C. Webb, is an excellent online textbook that gives you an end-to-end understanding of computer systems.
• Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, by Randal E. Bryant and David R. O'Hallaron, is an excellent textbook that covers several topics across computer systems.

Video courses

• My Lectures on Operating Systems page contains more lecture videos, practice problems, and programming assignments covering topics related to operating systems.
• My course material for Virtualization and Cloud Computing goes into more depth on virtualization and related topics.

Practice Problems

This PDF practice-problems.pdf contains some sample exam questions from the course offering at IIT Bombay.

Programming Exercises

To provide a more hands-on experience to the students of the NPTEL course, we conducted an online systems bootcamp on application system software and OS internals development during the Summer of 2022. The first week of the bootcamp consisted of several exercises to get familiar with Linux-based tools. Subsequent weeks consisted of two tracks: the application software track consists of a series of exercises to build a simple web server in C/C++, and the OS internals track consists of several simple exercises based on the xv6 operating system.

Lecture Videos and Slides

Link to YouTube playlist (contains all videos given below)