Brown University, Distinguished Lectures

Thanks to the CS Department Undergraduate Group at Brown University, who kindly extended the invitation for these lectures. Below find the slides and some lecture notes.

Presented by Matt Dillon, FreeBSD Developer
November, 2002


"A New Architecture for Large Distributed Databases"
As the need for larger and more robust databases grows, a new set of problems arise. Matt discusses his own research that led to the development of a new distributed database architecture, the Backplane, Inc. database core. This lecture focuses on replication and transactional coherency in large distributed databases, as well as commit methods, asynchronous updates and robustness.

"Current Methods in Virtual Memory" (PDF)
The virtual memory sub-system is one of the most important factors in the stability and performance of modern computing systems. In this lecture, Matt discusses the modern designs and techniques used in virtual memory systems, focusing on FreeBSD VM system architecture and including discussion on the selection of pages for reuse and the various operational cases with which every VM system must deal.