Distributed Systems

This course covers the basic concepts of distributed systems (principles, components, design approaches, implementation issues) , allowing students to gain an understanding of the capabilities offered and the problems faced by contemporary distributed. Systems. After an introduction to distributed systems (models), the course covers basic implementation issues (networking, multithreading, remote method invocation, security mechanisms) as well as basic issues in distributed processing (leader election, distributed transactions). Then, the course covers the basic concepts of peer to peer systems (structured systems, routing) and their applications (content search, multicast), presents some distributed services (distributed naming, distributed storage) and finally examines higher level communication facilities (message oriented middleware, web services). The applied part of the class focuses on the facilities provided by Java for programming distributed systems and the implementation of distributed applications. The programming project of the course involves the implementation of an structure peer to peer system for file searching using remote objects.

Objectives

• Understanding of the nature of distributed systems • Introduction to the capabilities offered • Understanding of the basic implementation issues • Introduction to appropriate programming environments

Prerequisites

• Computer Networks • Programming in Java • Operating Systems

Syllabus

Introduction, non-centralized systems, distributed system goals and services, client-server model, peer to peer model. Leader election. Atomic transactions. Communication mechanisms, remote procedure calls, networking in Java. Concurrency and threads, multithreading in Java. Distributed object systems, Java RMI. Security issues, security in Java. Distributed hash tables, Chord, Pastry and Scribe.Distributed naming systems, entity naming, naming, directory and location services. Distributed storage systems, NFS and AFS, PAST and CFS. Message oriented middleware. Web services.