COSC1174/1175 Adv Client Server Architectures

ISYS 2402 / 2403 : Advanced Topics in Distributed Systems

General Information

Course Manager: Professor Zahir Tari

Staff involved: Dr James Broberg, A/Prof. Jiankun Hu, Dr Ibrahim Khalil and Dr Ron van Schyndel

Course Description

This course is about advanced topics in Distributed Computing. It provides students with in-depth technical / scientific understanding of some of the key topics, such as distributed monitoring”, “performance (with load balancing and caching). This course complements existing courses of the Distributed Cluster by providing a much deeper technical understanding of the concepts, algorithms and architectures used to solve such issues/topics. The topics addressed in this course represent some of the key strength of the DSN (Distributed Systems and Networking) discipline at RMIT CS&IT.

Students will learn:

How to investigate core research issues in Distributed Systemd
How to compare and evaluate technical solutions proposed for the various topics covered in this course;
How to summarize and criticize solutions proposed by researchers

Short lectures will be presented face-to-face, followed by discussions. Students will be reading papers in four selected topics and they are expected to a) research the questions, b) present their findings and discuss with the class, and c) write a short report.

STUDENTS ARE ADVISED TO ATTEND THE DSN (Distributed Systems & Networking) Discipline seminars, which are held every 2nd/4th Friday of every month (3:00-5:00pm) at 14.10.06.

Teaching Schedule

Week 1: Mobile caching (2h - Lecture by Dr Ron Van Schyndel)
Week 2: Paper discussion (by students - 2h)
Week 3: Mobile caching (2h - Labs)
Week 4: Mobile caching (4h – Students’ presentations)
Week 5: Distributed monitoring (2h - Lecture by Dr Ibrahim Khalil)
Week 6: Paper discussion (by students - 2h)
Week 7: Distributed monitoring (2h - Labs)
\Week 8: Distributed monitoring (4h – Students’ presentations)
Week 9: Distributed load balancing (2h – Lecture by Dr James Broberg)
Week 10: Paper discussion (by students - 2h)
Week 11: Distributed load balancing (2h - Labs)
Week 12: Distributed load balancing (4h – Student presentations)

Assessment: An Overview

The assessment for this course consists of

3 presentations, each relates to one of the topics covered in the course.
3 written (short) reports of reading material. The reading materials (for a given topic) will be given by the lecturer in the first week when the topic has been started. A student has two weeks to read at least 4-5 papers in the area and provide a summary of the reading (maximum 3 pages). A template for the reports will be made available at the web site of the course.

The breakdown of the assessements is as follows

Week 4 (Monday 3:30)

½ presentation (11 marks)

Written report (22 marks)

Week 8 (Monday 3:30)

½ presentation (11 marks)

Written report (23 marks)

Week 12 (Monday 3:30)

½ presentation (11 marks)
Written report (22 marks)

Assessment: Guidelines and Information

This course has two (assessments) for every topic, namely presentation and written report. This will make a total of six (6) assessments for the whole course. At the start of each topic, students will need to choose a research question amongst those listed for the topic. Then students will have three weeks to prepare their presentations and reports for that topic.

The list of research questions (as well as the survey papers for the various) are given below. These survey papers are provided to help students in finding additional references to prepare their presentations / reports.

Here are some guidelines for the presentations / reports.

Presentations

Students will have 15-20mn (in Weeks 3/6/9/12) to present their readings on the topics of the course. There will be 10mn allocated to questions, which makes ½ h the total duration of every presentation. Each presentation should

be in powerpoint. Students should bring a USB containing a copy of their slides to lectures of Weeks 3/6/9/12.
have at least one slide of their presentations addressing the following aspects:

Problem statement / Research question
Background
Details of the proposed solutions, and
Critique / Evaluation of the proposed solutions.

Written reports