Distributed Systems Course (fall 2013/2014)

Passing Rules

To pass the course, a student has to score at least 60 out of a total of 100 points and pass the lab (see below). The points can be scored for:

• lab assignments: up to 50 points
• a written exam at the end of the semester: up to 50 points

The final grade is calculated as follows:

Points	0-51	52-59	60-67	68-75	76-83	84-91	92-...
Grade	2 (fail)	2+ (fail)	3	3+	4	4.5	5

Lab Rules

The goal of the lab is to allow each student build her own distributed system. The building process will consist of three assignments and one colloquium. To pass the lab, each student has to score a total of at least 26 points and at least 4 points per each assignment (except for Assignment 3 and Colloquium). The breakdown of the scores and deadlines is as follows:

What	When	How many points	Min. required points
Colloquium	October 16, 2013	5	0
Assignment 1	November 17, 2013, 23:59 CET	15	4
Assignment 2	December 31, 2013, 23:59 CET	15	4
Assignment 3	February 15, 2014, 23:59 CET	15	0

At the beginning of the course, students may decide if they want to work on the assignments individually or in pairs. No larger groups will be allowed. The decision cannot be changed during the semester (after the colloquium). The lecturer will not regard any conflicts within pairs as circumstances affecting grades. In other words, if you work in a pair, choose your partner well.

Assignment solutions have to be handed in on time by submitting e-mails with topic “[DS2013] Solution X” to the lecturer (where X can be 1, 2, or 3). Since the lecturer receives an excessive number of e-mails, e-mails with different topics may be ignored. Moreover, each day of delay in submitting a solution results in multiplying the scores received for the solution by 0.9. Normally, the delay must not be more than 12 days, after which an assignment is considered as failed (the student receives 0 points). However, each day a student participates in both a lecture and a lab gives the student one extra day of delay (in this day, the points are not multiplied by 0.9). No future days during which the student intends to participate will be counted toward the reduction. For students working in pairs, the reduction will be counted as the average of the lectures attended by each of the participants (rounded if necessary).

It is allowed to talk about your ideas on solving the assignments with your colleagues. It is NOT allowed to show, share, exchange code (in any form) without a prior permission from the lecturer.

Exam Rules

The exam covers the lecture topics. It consists of a series of questions. Each question has three subquestions with binary (TRUE/FALSE) answers. A students scores a point for a question only if the answers to all subquestions of the question are correct. Conversely, if an answer to any subquestion of the question is incorrect, no point is given for the entire question. Note that these scoring rules are really demanding (cf. the scores for 2012/2013).

Lecture Topics and Schedule

Since this is still a developing course, this year's lectures will be given mostly based on a book by my PhD adviser and the head of my former research group: Maarten van Steen and Andrew S. Tanenbaum, “Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms,” Second Edition, Prentice Hall, 2007, 702 pages, ISBN 9780132392273. Purchasing the book is not mandatory as the lecture slides will be available here. There will be a few lectures with an extra material, though.

Date	Topics	Slides
October 2, 2013	Introduction: goals of distributed systems, common types of distributed systems	lecture 01
October 9, 2013	Canceled. Participating in a PhD committee in Amsteram
October 16, 2013	Architectures: architectural styles, system architectures, self-management	lecture 02
October 23, 2013	Processes: threads, virtualization, clients & servers, server clusters, code migration	lecture 03
October 30, 2013	Communication: fundamentals, remote procedure call, message-oriented communication, stream-oriented communication, multicast communication	lecture 04-05
November 6, 2013
November 13, 2013	Naming: basic terms and definitions, flat naming, structured naming, attribute-based naming	lecture 06-07 and supplement
November 20, 2013
November 27, 2013	Synchronization: clock synchronization, logical clocks, totally-ordered multicast, causally-ordered multicast mutual exclusion, global positioning of nodes, leader election	lecture 08-09 and supplement
December 4, 2013
December 11, 2013	Consistency and Replication: continuous consistency, data-centric and client-centric consistency models, replica management, consistency protocols	lecture 10
December 18, 2013	Fault Tolerance: failure models, failure masking, failure detection, reliable client-server communication, atomic multicast, two-phase commit, three-phase commit, checkpointing, logging, recovery, agreement in faulty systems, Paxos	lecture 11-13
January 8, 2014
January 15, 2014
January 22, 2014	FINAL EXAM

Lab Topics and Schedule

The schedule of lab classes is as follows:

Date	Materials
October 2, 2013	Scenario 01
October 9, 2013	Canceled
October 16, 2013	Scenario 02
October 23, 2013	Scenario 03
October 30, 2013	Scenario 04
November 6, 2013	Individual work; questions and answers
November 13, 2013	Scenario 05
November 20, 2013	Scenario 06
November 27, 2013	Scenario 07
December 4, 2013	Scenario 08
December 11, 2013	Scenario 09
December 18, 2013	Scenario 10
January 8, 2014	Scenario 11
January 15, 2014	Scenario 12
January 22, 2014	Individual work; questions and answers