Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates

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Transcript

1. Further Experience with Teaching
   Distributed Systems to Undergraduates
   Gregory M. Kapfhammer
   Department of Computer Science
   Allegheny College
   http : //cs.allegheny.edu/˜gkapfham/
   Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates, 9th JCM, October 19-20, 2005 – p. 1/12
   

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2. The First Day of Class
   Are you ready? You must become comfortable with the
   theory and practice of the design, implementation, and
   analysis of distributed systems and algorithms
   I’ll never go back to a single address space again: students
   realize that building distributed systems is challenging and
   fun!
   Ricart and Agrawala who? distributed mutual what? why is
   Lamport stamping time? epidemic algorithms?
   I think I just had a page fault: students must manage a
   variety of complexity sources
   Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates, 9th JCM, October 19-20, 2005 – p. 2/12
   

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3. Distributed System Challenges
   Students need to be familiar with (or willing to learn!)
   material about programming languages, operating systems,
   networks, theory, and algorithms
   Nuts and bolts: RPCs in C, RMIs in Java, Java virtual
   machines, Jini 1.2 and 2.0, JavaSpaces, and the CLASSPATH
   Include concepts from concurrency such as semaphores
   and monitors with real implementations in Java
   What are we measuring? students must be able to conduct
   experiments to evaluate the relative strengths and
   weaknesses of algorithm and implementation choices
   Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates, 9th JCM, October 19-20, 2005 – p. 3/12
   

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4. Course Objectives
   Explore the principles and paradigms associated with
   distributed systems
   Principles: communication, naming, distributed scheduling,
   synchronization, mutual exclusion, consistency, replication,
   and fault tolerance
   Paradigms: become very familiar with object-based
   distributed systems using Jini and JavaSpaces
   Include a discussion of special topics such as distributed
   hash tables (DHTs), tuple spaces, and data stream
   management systems (DSMS)
   Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates, 9th JCM, October 19-20, 2005 – p. 4/12
   

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5. Instructional Objectives
   Course difficulty should be worn as a badge of honor
   Create exciting laboratory assignments where the students
   actually implement interesting systems and measure their
   performance
   A “gloves off approach” with a safety net: try to hide some
   complexity while ensuring that students retain perspective
   and understand many low-level details
   Require students to keep laboratory notebooks where they
   record hypotheses, data, observations, and design choices
   Read many scholarly and a few popular presss articles
   Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates, 9th JCM, October 19-20, 2005 – p. 5/12
   

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6. Topic: Remote Communication
   Discovery, code downloading, parameters, transparency
   Local, remote, and distributed objects
   Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates, 9th JCM, October 19-20, 2005 – p. 6/12
   

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7. Topic: Distributed Scheduling
   Unshared state, resource matching, and process migration
   Case studies: Sprite, Condor, Frugal, ComputeFarm for
   scientific computation and distributed testing
   Load balancing vs. load sharing and the cost/benefit tradeoff
   Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates, 9th JCM, October 19-20, 2005 – p. 7/12
   

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8. Special Topic: Tuple Spaces
   Space clients can write, take, and read Entry objects
   How do we measure performance and/or correctness?
   Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates, 9th JCM, October 19-20, 2005 – p. 8/12
   

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9. Special Topic: OpenDHT
   Clients can put and get with Sun RPC or XML-RPC
   How do we measure performance and/or correctness?
   Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates, 9th JCM, October 19-20, 2005 – p. 9/12
   

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10. Special Topic: Data Streams
    Continuous streams of data and queries
    Case studies: STREAM, TelegraphCQ, load shedding
    Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates, 9th JCM, October 19-20, 2005 – p. 10/12
    

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11. Conclusions
    The design and implementation of distributed systems is
    challenging, fun, and rewarding
    Current distributed systems textbooks are generally very
    good (there are still surprises, though!)
    There is a wealth of well-written literature from good
    conferences and journals
    Most students enjoy laboratories with Jini, JavaSpaces and
    Python (OpenDHT) while RPC programming in C is seen as
    tedious
    Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates, 9th JCM, October 19-20, 2005 – p. 11/12
    

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12. Resources
    Your comments, suggestions, and participation are invited!
    http : //cs.allegheny.edu/˜gkapfham/teach/cs441/
    Further Experience with Teaching Distributed Systems to Undergraduates, 9th JCM, October 19-20, 2005 – p. 12/12
    

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