The exam answers are due at 5pm on Tuesday, December 12 at my office in 3809 Boelter Hall. You may submit your answers by electronic mail (postscript, pdf, ascii text), or hard copy; no handwritten submissions, please:-)
This exam is open books, notes, libraries, archives, internet, etc. You are free to consult any static resource. Fellow class members, other students (UCLA or otherwise), faculty, friends (or enemies), etc., are NOT to be involved in any way.
The exam is basically "one question," so please limit your total response to 1500 words.
Note that because UCLA is a critical component of the Los Angeles County disaster and trauma care network, events such as earthquakes and Y2K bugs that might cause power interruptions must not significantly interfere with patient care. Even a fire in a portion of the facility should not be a devastating event with respect to information availability in other portions of the hospital.
Let's suppose that you have been retained as an operating systems expert to provide guidance with respect to decisions on key general systems architectural features. Assume further that the only decision that has been made so far is that some sort of major data warehousing service will work in conjunction with PDA-like devices that normally "live" within an arm's reach of the patient. Other systems may exist in addition to these two classes, of course.
Your task is to identify all major operating-system type issues, and provide a specific recommendation that satisfactorily addresses each issue identified. Example issues might include (but should not be limited to) reliability, centralized vs distributed data management, security, file systems, IPC, scaling, performance testing before usage and so on.