COURSE PRESENTATION FORM - DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS - 2009/2010


COURSE NAME: Distributed Systems

COURSE CODE: 70094

LECTURER: Werner Nutt

TEACHING ASSISTANT: To be determined

TEACHING LANGUAGE: English

CREDIT POINTS: 4

LECTURE HOURS: 24

EXERCISE HOURS: 12

TIMESPAN: 28.09.2009 - 23.01.2010

TIMETABLE: see Timetable Page

OFFICE HOURS LECTURER: To be determinedwhen the timetable is finalised

OFFICE HOURS TEACHING ASSISTANT: Time to be determined - Via Sernesi 1, office C 5.01

PREREQUISITES
Good programming skills, preferably in Java. Familiarity with operating systems.

OBJECTIVES
The aim of the course is to familiarize students with the principles of networking and distributed systems and to enable them to implement simple versions of distributed systems.

SYLLABUS
The course will address the following topics:

• Foundations of networking
• System models
• Concurrent programming, threads
• Interprocess communication
• Naming
• Time and clocks
• Coordination
• Fault tolerance

TEACHING FORMAT
Frontal lectures, lab sessions, projects

ASSESSMENT
The final mark will be based on coursework (lab and exercises) and on a written exam.
Students who do not submit coursework will be assessed on the exam alone.
For students who do submit coursework, the final mark will be based on both the exam mark and the exercise mark. In this case, a weighted average of the exam mark (70%) and the exercise mark (30%) will be computed. If this average is lower than the exam mark, the average will be the final mark. Otherwise, the exam mark will be the final mark.
The coursework will always be taken into account, independently of when the student takes the exam.

READING LIST
Textbooks:

• Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, A.S. Tanenbaum, M. van Steen, Prentice Hall, 2002.
• Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (Edition 4), G. Coulouris, J. Dollimore, T. Kindberg, Addison-Wesley, 2001.

SOFTWARE USED

• Network Simulators
• Virtual machines
• Java Software Development Kit

LEARNING OUTCOME
At the end of the course, students will be familiar with fundamental principles underlying networking and distributed systems and will have practical experience of distributed system design.

COURSE PAGE
http://www.inf.unibz.it/~nutt/DSs0910/