Syllabus

Instructor

Dr. Hanan Lutfiyya Middlesex College 418 Ext. 86888 hanan@csd.uwo.ca Office Hours: Wednesday 5-6; Thursdays 4-6 or by

appointment

Prerequisites

CS305 -- Operating Systems CS350 -- Computer Architecture (sometimes not enforced) CS357 -- Computer Communications Networks

It is expected that you have good C skills and some knowledge

of makefiles.

This course is an antirequisite to SE 466 (from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering)

Textbooks Required textbook

Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Maarten van Steen, Distributed Systems:Principles and Paradigms, Prentice-Hall

References G. Colouris, J. Dollimore and T. Kindberg, Distributed Systems:

Concepts and Design, 3rd edition, Addison-Wesley, 2001 J. Kurose and K. Ross, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach

Featuring the Internet, Addison-Wesley, 2001. R. Stevens, Unix Network Programming, Volume 1, Prentice-Hall Links to web pages on various topics; man pages

Lecture Notes

Lecture overheads will be available (hopefully) before each lecture.

They will be available in powerpoint format.

E-mail Contact

All e-mail that I send will be to your GAUL account. It is your responsibility to check your GAUL account or to forward the e-mail to another account.

I will ignore e-mail from hotmail accounts and other UWO accounts unless you cc your UWO account in the message.

Student Evaluation

Final Exam: 40% (April 21) Quiz: 15% (Feb 20) 3 Programming Assignments: 35% 2 Concept Assignments: 10% No makeup quiz except for religious reasons. I need two

weeks warning and you must go through your Dean’s office. If you miss your quiz for a non-religious reason and present

valid documentation to the Dean’s office, your Final exam mark will be reweighed to include the weight of the Quiz.

Special Note for Graduate Students

Instead of concept assignments, you must complete paper reviews.

Student Evaluation

To be eligible to pass the course, a student must receive at least 40% in the quiz/exam component and at least a 40% in the individual assignments.

To be eligible to receive an overall grade of 60% or higher in the course, a student must receive at least 50% in the quiz/exam component and at least 50% in the individual assignments.

Assignments

Three programming and two concept Concept assignments are meant to help you keep up with the

material. This should be good preparation for the quiz and exam.

Assignments are made available through the course web page. All assignments are due by midnight. You must submit to

both the locker and electronically.

Late Assignments

There is a penalty of 2^n marks, where n is the number of days late.

The weekend counts as one day. Extensions will be granted only on serious medical or

compassionate grounds. Extensions will NOT be given for minor illness.

Late Coupons

You are given 3 “late coupons” Late coupons may be applied toward the individual

assignments but not toward the group assignment. Each coupon is a one day extension. Rules

No transfer to other students Once used, you may not receive it back Coupons cannot be redeemed retroactively Unused coupons are not redeemable for extra marks Use of a late coupon does not change the final date on

which an assignment will be accepted.

More Assignment Information

Keep a backup! Requests for an adjustment in an assignment mark must be

made within 2 weeks after the assignment is returned in class. All such requests are to be written and submitted to me.

Assignments must satisfy the specifications given in the assignment description!

Course Objectives

The main objective is to study the principles of distributed computing.

Distributed computing is a broad subject. This course roughly focuses on the following: Topics related to distributed system services such as

support for RPCs and file systems. Topics related to the development of reliable distributed

applications. This includes socket programming, RPC, replication, election algorithms, time, consistency and security. Your programming assignments will focus on this.

Topics

Communication Network organization Socket Programming RPC

Processes Iterative vs. Concurrent servers Thread Programming Design Issues

Naming Synchronization Consistence and Replication Security File Systems Distributed object-based systems (CORBA, DCOM) (time permitting)

Any Questions?

Frequently Asked Questions

Will you be providing previous exams? No

Why? This is almost the first time that I have taught the course.

Can I use last year’s CS402 book and not this year’s CS402 book? The answer is probably “yes”, but I think this year’s book

is better written which is one of the reasons it was chosen. This course seems to be a heavy load. Is it?

We will find out