Verteilte Systeme VO

Verteilte Systeme VO 2.0 (184.237), WS, Mehdi Jazayeri, Karl Göschka

Vortragender Wintersemester 2007/08: Karl Göschka
Die Lehrveranstaltung wird auf deutsch abgehalten.

The course covers the principles and foundations of distributed systems and applications. Topics to be covered are: models of distributed systems; communication; concurrency; remote procedure call; network security; names and name service; shared, replicated, and partitioned data management; distributed services and middleware; client/server and distributed object systems; event-based systems.

The course will be held in WS2007/2008.

Blocked course: October 16, 2007 till November 14. (Changes, if any, will be announced in the lecture.)

Lecture schedule (times and locations)

If you want to do the Distributed Systems Lab (Verteilte Systeme LU), you should attend the preparation meeting which will be held on October 11, 16:00, EI7. For the lab it is mandatory to register. Details about the registration process are available at the lab web site at www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/teaching/courses/dslab/. Make sure to check the lab web site for changes or updates.

If you are studying business informatics ('Wirtschaftsinformatik') and need to take IT/RAK, please take a look at the 'Fachschaft' page.

Course Material

The course is based on the book:

Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Maarten van Steen. Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (Second Edition). ISBN 0-13-239227-5, Prentice-Hall, 2006.

The lecture schedule indicates the material you are expected to read in the book.

With your student ID (Studentenausweis), you can buy the book for the reduced price of EUR 65,-- in the Lehrmittelzentrum (LMZ). You do not have to get a 'Hörerschein' any longer. You also get the book from Amazon.

Lecture Downloads

The slides used in the course are available online from this page. The slides used in the previous term can be downloaded here. Other good books on distributed systems:

• Coulouris, J. Dollimore, T. Kindberg. Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, 4th ed., ISBN 0321-263-545, Addison-Wesley, 2005
• K. P. Birman, Reliable Distributed Systems, Springer, 2005, ISBN: 0-387-21509-3
• W. Emmerich. Engineering Distributed Objects, John Wiley, 2000.
• G. R. Andrews. Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming, Addison-Weseley, 2000.

Lecture and examinations

On the written exam you can earn up to 100 points and the grades are assigned as follows:

Points Grade 
90--100 S1
79--89 U2
67--78 B3
55--66 G4
00--54 N5

The exam dates and results can be found here

What you should learn in this course

Recommendations by Prof. Dr. Mehdi Jazayeri

In studying distributed systems, as in the study of any other scientific discipline, you must learn:

1. the terminology and vocabulary of the field
2. the concepts of the field
3. the techniques and methods of the field.

The vocabulary of the field defines the entities that the field deals with and defines the scope and limits of the field. The concepts of the field are fundamental ideas and abstractions that help analyze, understand, and solve the problems of the field. Techniques and methods are applications of the concepts to solve problems.

After completion of this course, you should be able to define terms such as distributed systems, nodes, network, protocol, local area net, WAN, scalability, etc. You should be familiar with concepts such as distribution, replication, caching, ordered multicast, connection-less protocols, distributed control, etc. Finally, you should be able to design a distributed system to satisfy a given set of requirements such as those of a flight reservation system. Naturally, to be able to design a system, you must be familiar with the concepts and to understand the concepts, you must know the vocabulary.

The exam is structured to test your understanding based on this three-layered structure of the field:

• If you know the vocabulary very well, you earn a 4.
• If you also know the concepts, you earn a 3.
• If you know the concepts very well and can apply them, you earn a 2.
• If you can apply the concepts very well, you earn a 1.