General Information

General

Teacher: Panagiota Fatourou
Office: 215 (White Building 1st floor)
Office hours: Tuesday: 13:00 - 15:00
Email address:
Telephone number: +30 2810 393549
TA: Eleftherios Kosmas
TA's office: Graduates' lab, White building sub level
TA's office hours: Thursday, 13:00-14:00
Email address:
Course email address:

Class Information

Tuesday, 11:00-13:00, class PA201. Thursday, 11:00-13:00, class PA201.

Course Summary

Topics covered in this course include: interprocess communication and remote invocation, distributed naming, time and event ordering, fundamental algorithms such as vector clocks, coordination and agreement, election, termination detection, distributed transaction mechanisms, replication of data and computation, fault tolerance, distributed shared memory, distributed file systems, case studies of real-world systems, and others.

This class is geared toward graduate students at all levels as well as advanced undergraduates (Computer Science 345 and Computer Science 453 are prerequisities for this course).

Program

Week Subject
1st Characterization of a Distributed System
2nd System Model
3rd Interprocess Communication
4th Operating System Support
5th Name Services
6th Distributed File Systems
7th Time and Global States
8th Coordination and Agreement
9th Transactions and Concurrency Control - Distributed Transactions
10th Replication
11th Distributed Shared Memory
12th Peer-to-Peer Systems
13th Peer-to-Peer Systems

Assignments and Marking

This course will involve a project, the presentation of a paper per each student into class and leadership of a class discussion on the paper, and a final exam.

During the presentations session, students should actively participate in class discussions. For each presented paper, we will study the contribution of the paper, place this contribution in context of previous literature, critique the methodology used and the evaluation presented.

Students will be required to undertake (in groups of two) a project which will involve some programming. Students may propose their own topic for the project or they may ask the instructor to propose a project for them. Students will choose the problem from a list of problem descriptions we provide. Finally, the students will undertake a final exam (on the material been taught be the instructor; the material of each paper presented by the students is not included in the reading material for the exam).

Paper presentation: 20%

Final Project: 40%

Final Exam: 40%

Course Emailing-list & Electronic Account

The course uses an emailing list for the efficient communication of the instructor and the TAs with the students. Subscription to the emailing list is performed by sending an email to the following address:

with empty subject and the following line as the email body:

Students are obliged to subscribe to the emailing list by the March 5, 2010. The address of the emailing list is:

All emails sent to this address will be forwarded to all members (students, instructor, TAs) of the list. It is a strong recommendation to the students to read email regularly (e.g., once a day).

The address of the electronic account of the course is the following:

Students may send any questions concerning the course to this address.

Prerequisities

CS345 (Operating Systems) and CS453 (Parallel Programming) are prerequisite courses for this course. Students that have failed on the courses mentioned above, do not to have the required background to attend this course.

Related Bibliography

Previous Years