CSC 456: Distributed Systems

Course Objective:

Understanding the main characteristics of distributed systems and the various design choices required for building a distributed system such as: the architectural models varying from client/server to peer-to-peer, grid-computing; the communication models varying from client-pull (RPC/RMI, Message Queuing, …) to server-push models (publish-subscribe, …); the synchronization techniques based on system clock, on logical clock(timestamp) and on token ring; the communication standards such as RPC, RMI, Corba and SOAP.

Grading Policy:

Midterm 1      20%
Midterm 2      20%
Final Exam    40%
Project           20%

Tentative Schedule:

Week	Topic	Course Materials	Assignments
Week 1-2	Definition of a distribute system (DS) Main charachterisitics of a DS. Main properties of a DS Quality of DS	Introduction	Tutorial
Week 3-4	Architectural models Generations of archterctural models Main architectural models Communication models Main communication models Coupling/Decoupling dimensions	Chapter 2: Models          Architectural Models	Tutorial
Week 5-6	Architecture of RPC Passing parameter with RPC rpcgen Client/Server with RPC	Remote Procedure Call         RPC         RPC demo	Tutorial
Week 7	Common Object Request Broker Architecture	CORBA        CORBA demo	Tutorial
Mid Term 1 Exam: Wednesday April 9, 2014 at 4pm  (Past Exams)
Week 9-11	Remote Meth od Invocation (RMI) Remote and local objects Passing parameter in RMI Client/Server with RMI Serialization Discovering available servers Distributed systems with RMI	Chapter 4: Remote Method Invocation: RMI	Tutorial
Week 12-13	CPU clocks CPU clock based Synchronization algorithms Logical clock: definition and properties Timestap based Synchronization techniques	Chapter 5: Synchronization
Mid Term 2 Exam: Sunday May 11, 2014 at 4pm (past exams)
Week 14,15	Parallel Programming Project Presentation
Final Exam

 

Project:

•  Project Description

Textbook:

• Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design by G. Coulouris, J. Dollimore and T. Kindberg. 5th Edition