Computer Laboratory – Course material 2009

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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; some of the techniques that have been used to build them; 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.
Algorithms and application protocols. Replication management. Strong and weak consistency. Asynchronous and synchronous algorithms. Atomic commitment. Process groups. Election. Mutual exclusion.
Middleware. Overview of synchronous, asynchronous, and event-based communication. Web services.
Naming. Design of names, pure or hierarchical. Interpretation of names in context. Binding. Long-term consistency. Finding entities in the chaotic environment of a distributed system.
Access control. ACLs and capabilities in distributed systems. Role-based access control. Policy expression and enforcement.
Storage. Design issues for network-based storage services. Storing different types of objects; addressing; object decomposition.
Applications. Pervasive computing environments. Events, composite events, mobility, 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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