Liam's Computer Science Learning Journal

           While we didn't cover much new curriculum this week, I made significant progress on the group project and feel thoroughly inspired by  A Cloud Gaming Framework for Dynamic Graphical Rendering Towards Achieving Distributed Game Engines to further explore distributed computing. Through this project, I learned how the architecture of cloud gaming impacts both performance and accessibility. I was especially interested in the authors’ motivation to move away from monolithic, single-VM designs toward a distributed system that dynamically shifts rendering between cloud and client devices. This approach not only improves frame rates but also allows games to keep running under network degradation, which gave me a deeper appreciation for fault-tolerant design. I also spent time refining my ability to break down technical content for a presentation. Since our project involved presenting to the class via video, I practiced distilling the compl...

          This week of CST334 saw the class exploring file system implementation, low-level storage performance, and file system-related system calls. The lab work on persistence calculations proved to develop muscle memory on cranking and understanding disk access times. The calculation involves computing rotational delay, seek delay, and data transfer delay using given parameters such as RPM, transfer rate, and read size. These exercises reinforce how physical disk characteristics affect overall performance, and how to estimate the latency of accessing files on spinning disks. We also worked with inode-based file systems. Given inode sizes, inode numbers, and starting locations, we calculated exact inode addresses, identified their containing blocks, computed their offset within those blocks, and determined their index. This helped further solidify my understanding of how a file system maps logical structures (like inode numbers) to physical disk addresse...