Current instructional emulation platforms often present limitations, either by overly simplifying operating systems or by offering hardware emulation that is too complex for students to fully grasp. This results in a gap between academic learning and real-world applications in both operating systems and computer architecture courses. EDUsim is introduced as a solution to these challenges, offering a modern, extensible emulation platform built with C++ that bridges the gap between hardware and software instruction. As a highly portable and modular operating system, EDUsim allows students to interact with realistic yet comprehensible system components. The platform enables a range of use cases, from fully emulated environments to interactions with real hardware, making it suitable for both OS and architecture instruction. The abstraction layers in EDUsim, including CPU and device models, enable rapid hardware emulation while maintaining flexibility. This paper discusses the design and implementation of EDUsim and explores its potential for improving instructional approaches in computer science education.

In this paper we provide an overview of the CS@SC Summer Camps, which is a week-long exposure program to teach K-12 students about computer science. Students attend the program on campus at the University of Southern California, experiencing life as a college student while learning about a valuable field that is currently in high demand. The camps have a proven record of drawing interest from groups that are under- represented in computer science: girls (over 40% attended), minorities (over 70% attended), and low income families (over 80% of attendees with an annual family income less than $40k). Although a majority of the attendees expressed interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields prior to attending camp, the camps further increased interest by over 12%. We conclude that exposure programs such as CS@SC serve an important purpose, that of increasing the diversity and number of students pursuing education and careers in STEM fields.

HoTMaN (HoT-standby MaNager) is a joint project between MySpace and USC Database Laboratory to design and develop a tool to ensure a 24x7 up-time and ease administration of Terabytes of storage that sits underneath hundreds of database servers. The HoTMaN tool's innovation and uniqueness is that it can, with a few clicks, perform operational tasks that require hundreds of keyboard strokes by "trusted trained" experts. With HoTMaN, MySpace can within minutes migrate the relational database(s) of a failed server to a hot-standby. A process that could take over 1 hour and had a high potential for human error is now performed reliably. A database internal to HoTMaN captures all virtual disks, volume and file configurations associated with each SQL Server and candidate hot-standby servers where SQL server processing could be migrated. HoTMaN is deployed in production and its current operational benefits include: (i) enhanced availability of data, and (ii) planned maintenance and patching.