Class Information
Staff |
Course Objectives and Scope |
Course Prerequisites |
Textbook |
Lectures |
Dishonesty |
In this course you will learn some of the key ideas that have
proved useful or are expected to be useful for designing and building
tomorrow's distributed systems. The course focuses on fundamentals. We
will cover problems, models, algorithms, and impossibility
results. But to keep ourselves honest, we will integrate the
theoretical discussions with a substantial project, that will allow to
apply some of the concepts discussed in class.
Topics will include the majority (we are going to shoot for all and
see what happens) of the following:
- Global states and event ordering
- Logical clocks
- Vector clocks
- Consistent cuts and global property detection
- Rollback-recovery and message-logging protocols
- State machine approach
- Agreement protocols
- Failure detectors
- Replication and consistency
- Byzantine fault tolerance
- Atomic Commit
You should have a good undergraduate background in Operating Systems
and be willing to participate in class. You should also be comfortable
about developing proofs, as many of the homework problems will require
you to develop protocols and prove them correct. For instance,
you should have no problems about how to use
induction.
The course programming assignments require facility with the JAVA
programming language.
There is no required textbook for this class. You will be able to
integrate your class notes with pointers to papers relevant to the
material discussed in class, which I will post on the class web site.
If you want to purchase a book, I recommend one of the following:
- A.S. Tanenbaum and M. van Steen. Distributed
Systems. Principles and Paradigms. (2nd Ed.) Prentice Hall, 2007.
This book provides a good starting point for several of the topics we
will discuss, with an informal presentation style.
Other books that we may occasionally refer to or that you may want to
browse include:
- S. Mullender (editor) Distributed Systems, Second
Edition, ACM Press, Addison-Wesley, MA, 1994.
This book, which
contains the lecture notes from a summer course on Distributed
Computing, discusses important aspects of both the theory and the
practice of distributed computing. The authors include many of the
leading researchers in the area.
-
H. Attiya and J. Welch. Distributed Computing: Fundamentals,
Simulations, and Advanced Topics (2nd Ed.) . Wiley 2004.
A discussion of distributed computing with a strong theoretical bias.
- N. Lynch Distributed Algorithms Morgan Kauffman, 1996.
A monumental tome on, well, distributed algorithm. Not an easy read,
but a very good reference.
- P.A. Bernstein, V. Hadzilakos and N. Goodman. Concurrency
Control and Recovery in Database Systems Addison-Wesley, MA,
1987.
A true classic.
The material presented in lecture be integrated with articles
that will be distributed in class.
5:00-6:30 pm Tuesday and Thursday, in Welch 2.256.
There will be two 3-hour make-up classes on Friday 9/21 and
11/16. These classes will take place in Painter 3.14.
Please see syllabus for details.
It is important for you to realize what grades in this class reflect
and what they don't reflect. All we can grade you on is how well you
demonstrate that you know the material this semester. We can't grade
you on how much of a success you'll be after graduation, how
smart/creative/persistent/self-motivated you are, or even how well
you'll be able to apply the material in the future. And after all, it
is what you do in the future, not what you do this semester, that's
really important.
That said grades will be determined as follows:
|
Exams (2)
|
55%
|
|
Homeworks (3)
|
15%
|
|
Projects (2)
|
30%
|
The midterm will take place in class on October 16. The final will
take place on DECEMBER 11, from 7 to 10 PM.
If you have a conflict with these dates, please inform the instructor
by September 2nd. After this date, conflicts will be considered if
they are caused by either:
-
Illness, which has to be documented by a doctor and approved by the university.
-
Death in the immediate family.
In some courses, the TAs and instructor have to spend a lot of time
dealing with re-grading appeals, time that would be better spent
helping students learn the material. Absolutely come to us if we make
an arithmetic error, but realize that a few points here and there are
extremely unlikely to make any difference in your final grade. If you
believe that we assigned too little credit for your work, you may
submit your work for a re-grade under the following restrictions. (1)
All re-grade requests must be submitted with a clear, written
statement that explains why you believe the original grade was
incorrect. (2) All requests for re-grades must be submitted within 1
calendar week of when the graded work is returned. (3) We will
re-grade the entire exam, problem set, or project assignment, and if
we were overly generous we will deduct points. Thus, you grade can go
up or down on a re-grade.
Late policy. No extensions will be given for
completing the homeworks or the programming projects, except that
students will be allowed 4 flexible slip days for the projects and two
slip days for homeworks during the semester. A student may divide
slip days across projects in any way he or she wishes to extend
deadlines for the projects (or a homework.) To help the TA track your
slip-day status, the top of your project README file (or your
homework) should include the line:
Slip days used (this project):
_______ Slip days used (total): ______
Please not that:
-
Assignments that do not carry this information will not be
graded.
- Misrepresenting slip days information will be
considered as a violation of academic integrity
Slip days will be tracked at the granularity of a day; if an
assignment is 1 minute late, it is one day late: this is not to be
draconian, but to show some respect for your TA. If two project
partners have different numbers of slip days remaining on their
accounts, the slip days account for the team is the
min of the partners' slip day balances.
Project slip days may not be used for homeworks and vice versa. Exemptions
of the above rules will be allowed in two cases:
Illness, which has to be documented by a doctor and approved by the university.
Death in the immediate family.
My colleague Elaine Rich maintains a very informational web page (The
Computer Sciences Department Rules to Live By). I urge you to read
it. It discusses dos and don'ts for a productive and enjoyable
semester of learning together. It also outlines the expectations that
the code of academic honesty puts on you, and the consequences of
violations. In particular, you should be aware that anyone who is
caught cheating will, in the absence of circumstances that require
stricter sanctions, receive an F in this class.
This page is maintained by Lorenzo Alvisi. Last updated August 28,
2008
