Computer Laboratory > Teaching > Course material 2009–10 > Concurrent and Distributed Systems

 

Concurrent and Distributed Systems
2009–10

Principal lecturer: Prof Jean Bacon
Additional lecturer: Dr Ken Moody
Taken by: Part IB
Syllabus
Information for supervisors (contact lecturer for access permission)

Concurrent and Distributed Systems is a new course for Part 1B. For past exam questions, those for Part 2 Distributed Systems are relevant. For the first eight lectures, on Concurrent Systems, see past exam papers before 2002 and look for the questions on Concurrent Systems. From 2002, Concurrent Systems and Advanced Java were combined into Concurrent Systems and Applications. CSA questions are therefore not all relevant. See here for an annotated list of questions you might look at.

Here are the pdf/ppt versions of the course notes.
The versions for Concurrent Systems date from after the course was given and contain corrections to the notes as printed.

Concurrent Systems Distributed Systems

Much of "Operating Systems, Concurrent and Distributed Software Design" by Jean Bacon and Tim Harris, Addison Wesley 2003, is relevant to this course.

chapters 2, 3, 4 revision of system structure, I/O and processes
chapters 9 - 14 classical concurrency control and IPC (main memory)
chapters 15 - 21 persistent memory, transactions, database concurrency control and recovery
ch7 Fundamentals of distributed systems
ch16 Distributed IPC
ch22 Distributed transactions
ch23 Distributed algorithms
ch28 The World-Wide Web
ch29 Middleware

Earlier editions of Concurrent Systems by Jean Bacon contain similar chapters. The classical material is unchanged. Middleware was substantially updated in 2003 and, even so, is now out-of-date. Each chapter has exercises. There is a web-browsable Instructor's Guide which is normally for teachers, password-protected, via Addison Wesley. It is available - here - *for local use only*. Please respect this.

At SOSP17, Dec 99, Jerome Saltzer of MIT gave a keynote address which included some spectacular failures of large-scale system design. Here is the pdf: Saltzerthumbnails.pdf.

At Middleware 2009, Dr Ludmilla (Lucy) Cherkasova, of HP Research Labs, Palo Alto, gave a keynote address to the Doctoral Symposium. The short case study for storage systems is taken from it. Here is the talk in ppt and pdf.

At Middleware 2009, Professor Hector Garcia-Molina, of Stanford, gave a keynote address, referred to in the lecture on naming.

At Middleware 2009, Steve Vinoski, of Verivue, formerly Iona, gave a keynote address, referred to in the lecture on middleware.