CS7NS6 – Distributed Systems – Teaching and Learning

Module Code	CS7NS6
Module Name	Distributed Systems
ECTS Weighting	5 ECTS
Semester Taught	Semester 2
Module Coordinator/s	Professor Vinny Cahill

Module Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this module, students will be able to:

Describe the basic characteristics, structure and operation of a distributed system, and the issues that a distributed system poses for a system architect;
Identify and evaluate appropriate architectural models and paradigms for building large-scale distributed systems;
Design, construct, document and test distributed systems;
Reason about the trade-offs between scalability, performance, consistency, reliability and availability in distributed systems;
Make use of appropriate documentation and reference material.

Module Content

Building distributed applications is still a difficult task due to the concurrency, communication latency, and possibility of partial failure that are inherent in computer networks. As in other areas of computer science, the trend in providing support for building distributed applications has been towards presenting application developers with high-level abstractions on which to base the design of their software.

This course takes a critical look at some of the architectural issues involved in, and paradigms available for, the construction of large-scale distributed systems such as the infrastructures supporting Google’s search engine or Amazon’s online sales platform. In particular, the course considers how to develop systems that must make trade-offs between performance, consistency, reliability, and availability.

Students will be given opportunities to develop their problem solving, programming and communication skills by designing solutions to distributed systems programming problems as well as implementing such solutions as distributed systems.

Specific topics addressed in this module may include:

Distributed Algorithm Design;
- Mutual exclusion, leader election;
Characterization of Failure and Failure Models;
Atomic Transactions;
- Serializability;
Coordination, Consensus, Agreement;
- Distributed commit protocols;
Replicated Data;
- Consistency models, replication protocols;
Recovery;
- Logging, checkpointing;
Process Groups;
Group Communication;
- Reliable and ordered multicast.

Teaching and Learning Methods

Lectures, tutorials/in-class team-based problem solving exercises, student-led lessons, team-based program development exercises.

Assessment Details

Assessment Component	Brief Description	Learning Outcomes Addressed	% of Total	Week Set	Week Due
Individual Distributed Application Design Exercise	Design of a large-scale distributed application.	All	60%	TBC	TBC
Team-based Lesson Preparation and Delivery	Delivery of a lesson on a seminal distributed system to the class.	L01, L02, L04, L05	10%	Staggered – 4 Weeks per Team	N/A
Team-based Programming Project	Development of a challenging distributed application.	All	30%	Week 2	Week 12

In addition to satisfying the School’s requirement that students complete at least two-thirds of any continuous assessment exercises, students are required to contribute appropriately to all team-based exercises.

Reassessment Details

Individual distributed application design exercise, (100%).

Contact Hours and Indicative Student Workload

Contact Hours (scheduled hours per student over full module), broken down by:	44 hours
Lecture	22 hours
Laboratory	0 hours
Tutorial or seminar	11 hours
Other	11 hours
Independent Study (outside scheduled contact hours), broken down by:	76 hours
Preparation for classes and review of material (including preparation for examination, if applicable)	18 hours
Completion of assessments (including examination, if applicable)	58 hours
Total Hours	120 hours

Module Pre-requisites

Prerequisite modules: N/A

Other/alternative non-module prerequisites: Experience of building concurrent (multi-threaded) and networked applications

Module Co-requisites

N/A

Module Website

Blackboard