Computer Laboratory – Course material 2008

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Distributed Systems

Lecturer: Dr D. Evans

No. of lectures: 8

Prerequisite courses: Concurrent Systems and Applications, Operating Systems, Digital Communication I, Introduction to Security

Aims

The aims of this course are to study the fundamental characteristics of distributed systems, including their models and architectures; the implications for software design; and the resulting details of good distributed algorithms and applications.

Lectures

Introduction. Characteristics specific to distributed systems. Software structure. Modelling, designing, and engineering distributed software. Issues of scale and trust. Why seemingly easy problems suddenly become hard.
Time. Physical and logical time. Event ordering. Clock synchronisation. Message delivery ordering.
Communication. Overview of synchronous, asynchronous, and event-based middleware. Web services.
Naming. Design of names, pure or hierarchical. Interpretation of names in context. Binding. Long-term consistency.
Algorithms and application protocols. Replication management. Strong and weak consistency. Asynchronous and synchronous algorithms. Atomic commitment. Process groups. Election. Mutual exclusion.
Access control. ACLs and capabilities in distributed systems. Role-based access control. Policy expression and enforcement.
Storage. Design issues for network-based storage services.
Applications. Pervasive computing environments: active office, home, and city. Events, composite events, mobility and, location-tracking. Electronic health, police, and transport services.

Objectives

At the end of the course students should

understand the fundamental properties of distributed systems and how to design software to accommodate them
understand some basic distributed algorithms and the assumptions on which they are based
for widely distributed and/or large scale systems, understand how naming and access control can be designed
understand the tradeoffs involved in selecting various styles of middleware
and be aware of some emerging application areas, such as pervasive and mobile computing

Recommended reading

* Bacon, J. & Harris, T. (2003). Operating systems: distributed and concurrent software design. Addison-Wesley.
Tanenbaum, A.S. & van Steen, M. (2002). Distributed systems. Prentice Hall.
Coulouris, G.F., Dollimore, J.B. & Kindberg, T. (2005, 2001). Distributed systems, concepts and design. Addison-Wesley (4th, 3rd eds.).
Mullender, S. (ed.) (1993). Distributed systems. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed.).

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