CS 4414

Systems Programming

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

CS 4414 exposes students to programming applications at the systems level and to the operating systems abstractions that these applications depend on. It then builds on this foundation to look at systems issues that shape the performance and reliability of modern ML and AI applications, such as “chat bots” and question-answering AIs. We do not expect students to understand how these ML and AI tools work, in a mathematical sense. Instead our focus is on how the execute, where components run and how they talk one another, how they interact with big-data storage, and how they leverage accelerators such as GPU.

Last 3 terms offered 2024FA, 2023SP, 2021FA

Learning Outcomes REF-FA25

• Proficiency programming in C++ 20, using Visual Studio Code IDE on Linux (Ubuntu) demonstrated through successful completion of hands-on assignments.
• Proficiency with Linux commands and bash programming demonstrated through successful completion of hands-on assignments.
• Ability to write multithreaded code that leverages the full performance of modern NUMA servers demonstrated through successful completion of hands-on assignments that focus on speeding up code by using multicore parallelism.
• Interpretation of parallelism in many forms, and ability to create parallel solutions to practical computing problems, to implement them correctly in C++, and to debug and optimize solutions. Demonstrated through a mix of exam performance and ability to use these ideas when creating hands-on assignments.
• Ability to work with the monitor synchronization pattern in C++, and a deeper recognition of associated issues such as race conditions, critical sections, coordination through the consumer producer and readers-writers models, deadlocks, livelocks. Demonstrated through a mix of exam performance and ability to use these ideas when creating hands-on assignments.
• Appreciation of how these skills carry over to creating AI and ML solutions that perform well (meaning, they use computing platforms efficiently, don’t waste electric power, and are able to respond to tasks quickly).

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