Welcome to Distributed Systems 2022!

TDA596 (Chalmers), DIT240 (GU), 7.5 education credits, LP2 2022 / 2023

News

Give me your feedback!
https://forms.office.com/r/GCtJh4JfHR

 

Link to book help with the labs: https://chalmers-my.sharepoint.com/:x:/g/personal/ahmhass_chalmers_se/EQyPMobbKIBIheSEGJPXyeEBbpSzCX8kOKOLNtWWH5EIdw?e=A4txB1  

Zoom link: https://chalmers.zoom.us/j/62216812985 (Passcode: 048548)

Video Lectures uploaded here: https://play.chalmers.se/channel/TDA+596%3A+Distributed+Systems+2022/559194

 

- We have two exciting confirmed guest lectures.

• John Wilkes on November 21
  • More on John here: https://john.e-wilkes.com/
• Simon Tuffs on December 9th
  • More on Simon here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-tuffs-26481
  • Simon will be joined with his son Philip who helped him in developing the tool he will discuss with us.

- We have revamped the old assignments. The new assignments will need you to learn GoLang.  Why? Probably one of the most popular languages to build distributed systems in industry. The entire K8s is written in Go, and it helps in landing a job in the cloud market.

Information

• Course schedule and presentation slide - only accessible to registered students
• LABS:  Lab 1, Lab 2, Lab 3, Lab 4 
• In the first lecture you will learn about how we will run the course.  If you can not make it, ALL LECTURES will be recorded and uploaded.

Staff

The course is taught by yours truly:

• Ahmed Ali-Eldin  (Some day I will update my Chalmers Webpages, but not today :-), ahmed.hassan#at#chalmers.se)
  • Here is a little bit about myself: I am a new'ish assistant professor at the NS division. Joined the division after three years at UMass Amherst. Before that, I spent 6.5 years in Umeå in Northern Sweden, where I obtained my PhD. I am from Egypt originally, and I have lived in Sweden, India, Egypt, and the US....

Responsible for the course is

• Ahmed

Responsible for the labs are:

• Huaifeng Zhang <huaifeng@chalmers.se>

Course Representatives (randomly selected):

• Albin Otterhäll <gusalbiot@student.gu.se>
• MPCSN adedoyinbusayo@ymail.com        Busayo Adedoyin
• MPCAS   katele1013@outlook.com  Jiahui Le
• MPALG   marozas.julius@gmail.com        Julius Marozas
• UTBYTE  cager.st.220.284@gmail.com      Satoshi Takimoto

 

 

Your feedback is very important! As usual, we will use your feedback from the anonymous course evaluation and the feedback from the meetings with the course representatives to further improve the course. Additionally, your direct feedback is very welcome: please feel very invited to discuss the course and any suggestions you have with me personally.

Organization

While the class is done online, I would like this to be a fun class with as much  interaction and benefit as possible. There are many ways to teach this class, but here is a rough outline of what we will try this year.

• Most (theory) lectures  will be recorded and uploaded to Chalmers play,  YouTube, (any platform that the students prefer) before the date of the actual lecture. There will be two recorded lectures per week.
• Students will be expected to watch the lectures on their own, either using the allocated lecture time, or some other time that they feel more comfortable with.
• We will meet once weekly (on Friday), break out into smaller groups, and work on solving design/real problems, or discuss a system
• We will aim to cover as many applications as possible, especially towards the end of the class. These lecture will be live, with either myself, or a guest lecturer presenting.

Course Book

Marten van Steen and Andrew S. Tanenbaum, "Distributed Systems", CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, ISBN-10: 1543057381, ISBN-13: 978-1543057386, Third edition (!). There might be different ISBN numbers for hard and soft cover etc. Digital copy: On the site of the authors, a digital copy is available (upon request) for free (note that we are using the third edition).

 

Written Exams

The written exam will be held on:

• TBA

The examination will be based on:

• The course book, the lecture notes, the lectures, and homework/labs.
• The exam will challenge you to design, think, and discuss what you have learnt.

 

Motivation

Why should I take this class? What will I learn? In a nutshell, we will introduce and discuss the underlying concepts and mechanisms that drive today's distributed systems such as the Internet, data centers, etc.  The lectures will provide you with the required knowledge, and the labs give you a hands-on experience in developing distributed systems and exploring their real-world challenges. For more details, have a look at this (very short) overview presentation.

If you attend our first lecture, we will all play a game to discover the beauty of the subject at hand.