Module Title: Distributed Systems and Applications
Teaching hours: 39
Credits: 7,5
Semester: 2nd
Instructor: Fragopoulou Paraskevi Professor
Course Objectives
The course’s primary goal is the unification in the level of knowledge of the involved students in relation to large scale distributed systems. The course’s topic involves cutting-edge technology. The basic course material will include the following: after a general introduction to the topic of large scale distributed systems, a study of the most important architectures and technologies involved in modern distributed systems (i.e. peer-to-peer systems, computational Grids, service cloud infrastructures).
The research orientation of the course will include the presentation of the most recent research publications in the most important conferences in the field including the latest research developments. In the study and the presentation of these research papers the students following the course will be actively involved.
Indicative Syllabus
Introduction General introductory concepts to large scale distributed systems, the most recent developments in the field, the basic architectures, and also design and development methods.
Peer-to-peer systems The first peer-to-peer system – Napster. Unstructured peer-to-peer systems – the Gnutella paradigm. Structured peer-to-peer systems – Chord, CAN, Tapestry, Pastry, MAAN. Presentation of recent peer-to-peer systems like Kademlia, Bittorrent. Several topics will be covered like network topology, routing, resource discovery, replication methods, security.
Grid computing Architectural design and organization of computational Grids, Virtual Organizations, Grid middleware. The example of the pan-European Grid infrastructure EGEE. Desktop Grids and their middleware (i.e. BOINC). Development of parallel and distributed applications on computational Grids. Parallel computing libraries. Workflow systems.
Cloud computing and virtualization technology What is cloud computing and basic paradigms. The virtualization technology and synchronization of virtual machines.
Content management and delivery systems Multimedia streaming over peer-to-peer systems – basic techniques. Systems for storage and management of content.
Presentation of research topics from students.
Bibliography:
[1] “Reliable Distributed Systems”, Kenneth Birman, Springer 2005.
[2] “Distributed Information Systems”, E. Simon, Mc Graw Hill 1996.
[3] “A Scalable Content Addressable Network”, S. Ratnasamy, P. Francis, M. Handley, R. Karp and S. Shenker, Proc. of the ACM SIGCOMM 2001 Conference, San Diego, CA, August, 2001.
[4] “Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications”, I. Stoica R. Morris D. Karger M. F. Kaashoek and H. Balakrishnan, Proc. of the ACM SIGCOMM 2001 Conference, San Diego, CA, August, 2001.