ITEC452:  Distributed Systems  Syllabus

 

Instructor:                            Dr. Richard W. Tibbs http://www.radford.edu/~rwtibbs

Office:                                   230 Davis Hall (831-5780)

 

Office  hours:                      See web site above

 

Required Texts: 

“Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design,”  Coulouris, Dollimore & Kindberg, Addison Wesley. 4th ed., 2005. ISBN 0-321-26354-5

“Firewalls and VPNs,” Tibbs & Oakes, Prentice Hall 2006. ISBN 0-13-154731-3

 

Optional/Interesting Texts:             “Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux,”  Sterling (ed.),  MIT Press.

                                                                “Interprocess Communications in Linux,” J. S. Gray,  Prentice Hall

 

Grades:                                 There will be a midterm or midterms and a final worth approximately 100 points apiece. There will be 5 to 10 homework assignments worth about 200 points.  Half of your grade will be homework. Most homework assignments will be programming assignments.

 

Lab Project:   Implement a Firewall system, OpenMosix Grid computing with selected applications, like web server farm, SOAP applications, etc., depending on instructor.

 

Course Notes:            You are responsible for material presented in course notes, on black/whiteboards, and the texts.  FCFS: 5 points extra credit for any webct broken link!

 

Attendance:   You should plan on attending all lectures. You are responsible for all material presented in class, all exercises completed in class and all announcements made in class.  If you miss a class you are responsible for finding out what you missed, e.g., homework assignments, a test dates announced, etc.  Poor attendance, participation and inappropriate conduct (etiquette) in class will affect your grade negatively by an amount determined by the instructor at the end of the semester (up to 5% of your grade).  It is your responsibility to know important dates on the academic calendar, such as last day to drop, and last day to withdraw.  See the online calendar on the RU web site.

 

Etiquette:       Please come to class on-time since class is disturbed by constant late arrivals. Turn off all cell phones, beepers, PDAs, etc. Talking or other disruptions in class can result in being asked to leave.

 

Honor Code:        By accepting admission to Radford University, each student makes a commitment to understand, support, and abide by the University Honor Code without compromise or exception.  Violations of academic integrity, including plagiarism and cheating, will not be tolerated.   This class will be conducted in strict observance of the Honor Code.  Refer to your Student Handbook for details.  In this class the student is expected to do all out of class programming assignments on their own, without help from other students. All violations will be reported.   All assignment, including take-home exams, are to be done independently unless I specifically say otherwise. The only exception to this is, of course, the lab project.

 

Special

Assistance:           Any student who needs special accommodations because of a disability should contact the instructor during the first week of classes to make arrangements.  Please do not wait to see if you will need special accommodations for this class;  let me know ASAP so that it does not become a major problem.  It is the responsibility of any student with a disability who requests a reasonable accommodation to contact the Disability Resource Office (831-6350). Contact will then be made by that office through the student to the instructor of this class. The instructor will then be happy to work with the student so that a reasonable accommodation of any disability can be made.  

Rationale

Information Systems and Computer Science majors  are increasingly obtaining jobs developing distributed computing applications. Distributed computing is a core component of the ACM/IEEE “CS2001” model curriculum.  Networking in general is one of the key competencies in National Science Foundation’s ISCC’99 curriculum and the Data Processing Managers’ Association Model Curriculum for Information System programs. 

 

Prerequisites

Approval of instructor, junior or senior standing.

 

Laboratory Component

Lectures in the ITEC 451 course will be supported through lab and programming exercises.  Programming exercises will be conducted in the general purpose computing labs to the extent possible within the University’s established network security policies.   Exercises which require configuration changes and levels of access not permitted in the general purpose labs will be conducted in the IT Networking lab in DA 214.  Students are also encouraged to conduct exercises in student residences on their own computers or even temporary networks.

 

Topical Syllabus

 

 

Approximate

Week

Topic

Distributed Systems Book sections

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1

Introduction

chaps1,2

 

 

1

Inter-process Communication

chapter 4

 

 

2

(continued)

 

 

 

3

Distributed Objects

chapter 5

 

 

4

OS concepts, processes and threads & pgming

6.1, 6.2, 6.4

 

 

5

Communication and invocation mechanisms, OS arch.

6.5, 6.6

 

 

6

Security model, security concepts, digital signatures Kerberos, SSL (TLS)

7.1-7.4, 7.6.2, 7.6.3

 

 

7

Fault tolerance model, dist. file system, NFS

2.3.2, 8.1 - 8.2,8.3

 

 

7

Time

10 (all)

 

 

8

Coord.  & Agreement Multicast

11 (all)

 

 

9

Transactions, concurrency control

12.1-3, 12.5-7

 

 

10

Spring Break

 

 

 

11

Distributed transactions: commit protocols

13.1-3, 13.6

 

 

12

Replication model and fault-tolerant services

14.1-3

 

 

13

Gossip architecture, transactions

14.4-5

 

 

14

Distributed multimedia systems

15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 15.4

 

 

15

Dist multimedia, Tiger video file server

15.5, 15.6

 

 

16

Corba

17.1 and 17.2