Course syllabus

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Welcome to Distributed Systems 2023!

TDA596 (Chalmers), DIT240 (GU), 7.5 education credits, LP2 2023 / 2024

News

Information

Staff

The course is taught by:

  • 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 an associate 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....
  • Romaric Duvignau: (support examiner) https://www.cse.chalmers.se/~duvignau/ duvignau@chalmers.se

Responsible for the course is

  • Ahmed

Responsible for the labs are:

  • Huaifeng Zhang <huaifeng at chalmers.se>
  • Kåre von Geijer <karev at chalmers.se>
  • Wania Khan <wania at chalmers.se>
  • Ping Zheng
  • Simon Johansson

Course Representatives (randomly selected):

  • MPHPC   jbd2023up@yeah.net      Bodong Jia
  • sahni@chalmers.se     Himanshu Sahni
  • MPCSN   kanaan@student.chalmers.se      Basel Kanaan
  • MPCSN   luzihaoprivate@gmail.com        Zihao Lu
  • MPDSC   yifan.a.zhao@gmail.com  Yifan Zhao

 

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

A large part of the class will be with pre-recorded videos. The reason? I would like this to be a fun class and Distributed Systems topics related to theory can be very dull. We will however have a lot of  interactions. 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 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 Monday), to discuss a system.
  • We will aim to cover as many applications as possible, especially towards the end of the class. These lectures will be 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. There is a fourth edition which has just come out, and I do not expect that there are much differences between the two editions).

 

Written Exams

The written exam will be held on:

  • 09 Jan 2024 am J

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.

 

How can I pass the course?

The course is graded on 100. For Chalmers students, you need 90 pts to get a 5, 75 to get a 4, and 50+ to get a three. For GU students, you need 85pts for a VG, and 50+ for a G. There are two ways to pass the course:

1. Do parts of the three mandatory labs, and go to the exam.
2. Do the labs with the extra (bonus parts).  Each lab carries 10 pts for the mandatory part, and 15 pts for bonus. There are three mandatory labs, and one optional. You can score a 5/VG with the labs only and never come to the exam!

The teachers think that for maximum learning, the labs are probably much more important than the exam, but it is all up to you!

 

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.

Course summary:

Course Summary
Date Details Due