(Spring 2005)
Distributed Systems

Instructor

Madhusudhan Govindaraju

Teaching Assistant

Aniruddha Kannal: anikannal@gmail.com

Table of Contents

Hours
Course Description
Course Guidelines
Course book
Listserv
Participation
Readings
Resources
Course Announcements
Class Presentations
Assignments
Projects
Exams
Grading
Listserv
Policies

Hours

Lectures: Tuesday and Thursday: 4.35 PM - 5.50 PM in LH003

Office Hours of the instructor: Tuesday and Thursday: 2.45 PM - 4.15 PM

Office Hours of the TA: Tuesday and Thursday: 11.30 AM - 1.00 PM


Course Description

We will discuss the following topics in distributed systems. Here is a tentative schedule.
This course can be counted towards the MS degree requirement for a course that involves the
design and implementation of large programs.

Course Guidelines

Homeworks and assignments: All homework and programming assignments must be completed individually, unless indicated otherwise in the assignment/project description. You are free to discuss assignments with one another. However, each of you must write your own code, and you must write up all solutions individually; please do not show your work directly to other students, and do not look at other students' code or homework. Students submitting solutions that I decide are "too similar", will be punished equally and harshly. Learn from, teach, and help one another, but do not give or receive answers.

Late Submissions : The grade will be reduced by 10% every day that your submission is late.

Grade Changes and Complaints: All requests for changes of grades must be made in person, during the office hours of the instructor.

Office Hours :

  1. visit me during my designated office hours
  2. set up an appointment outside of office hours (especially if the hours are not convenient for your schedule)
  3. talk to me briefly just before or just after classx
  4. contact me by email
  5. post to the course listserve



Course Book

There will be no required textbook for the course material presented in class. All the required notes and powerpoint slides will be provided to you. We will be studying research papers from the literature, many of which will be available directly from the course web page.

Listserv

We will use the following listserv for the course: CS654-01@LISTSERV.BINGHAMTON.EDU . (Will be finalized soon)

Participation

Students are expected to attend the lectures and contribute to the discussion in the class. Class attendance, participation and discussion will affect the final grade.

Readings

We will study conference, journal papers and interesting articles on Distriuted Systems. You can get some of the papers from here

Reference Links


Resources

  • Bej's guide to Network Programming.
  • Programming in C and Unix System Calls
  • Debugging with dbx
  • How to use the Sun Workshop tools

    Announcements

    May 1st

    The syllabus for the final exam has been posted in "Exams" section of this page.

    April 21st

    The part IV of the project needs to be submitted before noon on May 3rd.

    April 21st

    We will discuss these papers next week:
    Tuesday: http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~maheswar/anc2002/PAPERS/CaK88.pdf

    Shivaratri, Niranjan G., Krueger, Phillip, Singhal, Mukesh Singhal, "Load Distributed for Locally Distributed Systems," Computer, Vol. 25, No. 12, pp. 33-44, December 1992.

    You should post a question on the paper by 8.00 AM on the day of discussion. Note that we will discuss just one paper each on Tuesday and Thursday. All of you will now be an "expert" for the paper that will be discussed on Tuesday and Thursday.

    April 11th

    The details of
    part IV of the project have been posted. Please visit the course web page to get started. The project is due by midnight on April 22nd.

    April 10th

    This Thursday we will discuss two papers, in the same format as last time. Here are the two papers:

    March 31st

    There is a Faculty Candidate talk today in Q23 (Engineering Building) at noon. Research area is related to data mining and info retrieval. Please attend!

    March 30th

    Here are the two papers for discussion on Tuesday of next week. Seven students should sign up for the 1st paper and six students for the second paper. Take a look at the papers and decide by Thursday. I will have a sign-up sheet in class. You are responsible for answering questions on the paper that you sign up for. For the other paper, you need to think of a good question (by Monday night) that will stimulate an interesting discussion in class.

    March 29th

    The final exam will be held in class on May 5th.

    March 11th

    Details of the midterm have been posted here .

    Details of Part III of the project have been posted.

    March 7th

    Added a file SerDeser.cpp (in the code templates section of the project)to show how to serialize and deserialize an integer.

    March 6th

    Added a code template (SocketTest.cpp) as an example of passing '0' for the port number so that a free port is automatically chosen.

    March 4th

    The total number of slack days , for all projects combined, has been increased from 3 to 6.

    March 2nd

    I have added a few classical papers to your reading list.

    March 1st

    The midterm exam will be held on March 17th.

    Feb 26th

    Search for "Code Template Changes" in the project page to check out the changes I have made to the code templates.

    Feb 23rd

    The code template for Server.cpp has been slightly modified. Now, the "namingService" has been defined before the call to exportObject.

    Feb 19th

    The code template for ClientCommunication has been slightly modified. Also, I have added a few more details to make the instructions more precise.

    Feb 18th

    Slides for Lecture 8 (Processes in Distributed Systems) have been posted. Please go through the slides and let me know if you have any questions. I am sorry that the slides couldn't be projectected on screen last time. I will try and get this problem fixed for next class.

    Feb 16th

    Details for Part II of the first project has been posted. The project is due by noon on Wed, March 2nd.

    Feb 6th

    Submission details for Part I of the first project has been updated.

    Feb 2nd

    Part I of the first project has been posted.

    Jan 31st

    Your first reading assignment has been posted here. The paper by Birrell and Nelson is a classical RPC paper. Your first project will be roughly based on the design mentioned in this paper.

    Jan 19th

    Make sure that you have an account on the bingsuns. You will need it for your first project.

    Jan 18th

    Welcome to the course web page!

    Class Presentations

    Lecture notes will be provided (usually) as Powerpoint slides. These notes will only serve as an outline for the discussion in the class. These are not a substitute for class attendance.