Table of Contents
Class Meetings
Course Description
Prerequisites
Required Textbook
Additional Reading
Instructor
Teaching Assistant(s)
Assignments
Grading
Workload
Course Communication
Topical Overview
Policy on Attribution
Policy on Late Submissions
Policy on the Presentation of Submitted Material
Class Meetings
Course Description
Prerequisites
Required Textbook
Additional Reading
Instructor
Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:45M - 2:45PM
Please be aware that the office hours listed above are only a minimum
guarantee. Unless I have other committments, I am typically in my
office most afternoons until about 4:00. I am also often available
during the late morning or evening hours. Many students find
it useful to finger me at gigo.sp.cs.cmu.edu (personal workstation)
or ux8.sp.cs.cmu.edu (favored cycle server) to make an educated
guess about my availability.
Teaching Assistant
Office hours: 3:00PM - 5:00PM Mondays and Wednesday, 10:00AM - noon Tuesdays
Assignments
Project(s), one of the options below (40%):
Grading
By the nature of the course, the scoring of many of the assignments
will be at least somewhat subjective. We will make every reasonable
attempt to ensure that is uniform across the entire class. But,
in the end, at least some portion of your grade will likely be
nothing more than the opinion of the course staff.
Unless you are told otherwise, grades should be interpreted using
the traditional 90/80/70/60 scale. In the end, the "dividing line"
between grades may be more favorable to the student than this, but
this is a useful minimum guarantee and estimator.
Very important! There is one caviat. Both a passing test average
and a passing project average are required to pass the class. This
suggests two pieces of advice:
It is our intention to offer the three exams as take-home assignments.
This is not a promise -- we'll see how it goes. If "cheating"
surfaces, they will likely become supervised, in-class exams.
These exams are tentatively scheduled for the 7th week,
the 13th week, and the week of final exams.
Workload
There will, of course, be times when the course demands more of your
attention than others. The week of the three exams and, perhaps,
the duration of prescribed project #3 come to mind as candidates
as "busier" times than others.
Course Communication
The course Web site will become an invaluable archive and portal
for useful information, including copies of all handouts, papers,
project information, lecture notes, &c. We will also try to maintain
a log of relevant questions and their answers during the lifetime
of assignments. Please check the site frequently for information about
current topics.
If something of an urgent nature should occur, we will use
andrew e-mail to notify you. Please check this account regularly, or
forward it to an account that you do check regularly.
The two principle methods of student-to-student communication are
the following:
We will occasionally post announcements to the bboard and answer
zephyr requests, so don't be surprised if we show up. But please
remember that we do not typically monitor either, so please don't be
disappointed if we don't appear.
The two principle methods of one-on-one student to staff communication
are the following:
To ensure the most prompt response to your questions by e-mail,
please address them both to the class TA(s) and to the
instructor. Within a couple of days a mailing list,
staff-412@cs, will become active.
Since this mailing list will reach all of us, we think you'll find
it a convenient way of getting prompt answers to your questions, &c.
We are here to help! Please don't be too shy to see us in person or to
send us mail, &c -- that's why we are here!
Topical Overview
Policy on Attribution
For obvious reasons, we might choose to give you less than full credit for
a submission that is not wholly yours. But, depending on the nature of the
help that you received, we might choose to give you full credit. In the
end our job is to assess what you do know, not what you once
didn't know.
This is a graduate level class. We will take breaches of this policy
very seriously. The maximum penalty at the course-level is a final
grade of "R"; other penalties might also be imposed by the University,
your college, and/or your program. Mitigating circumstances aside, we would
expect to impose the maximum penalty for any violation of this policy.
Please see the University's
Policy on Cheating and Plagarism for more information.
Policy on Late Submission
In general, late assignments are not accepted, even if they
are late by only seconds. There are two exceptions:
You may grant yourself up to four days of extensions during the course of
the semester. You may use them all for one assignment, or divide them
among several assignments. You are not required to use them at all.
If extension days are to be used for a group project, all members of the
group must have a sufficient number of extension days available.
For groups doing self-proposed projects, the extension days can be used
for the project as a whole, or for individual checkpoints. Before using
extension days for self-proposed checkpoints, please meet with a member
of the course staff. We recognize that the nature of these projects
might require some changes in the schedule -- we may allow you to
submit a revised schedule.
Please recognize that using extension days may delay the evaluation/grading
of your work -- perhaps substantially. This is not intended as punishment.
It is just a natural effect of the way the grading process is organized.
We will always do our best to return everything in a timely manner.
This policy give you a great deal of freedom -- and also a great deal
of responsibility. Please be careful -- people get sick, the power fails,
bad things happen to good people. You probably want to save some
late days for this type of thing. Furthermore, a project partner may be
upset with you if you squander your late days and they would be useful
on a project.
To use an extension day, you must send e-mail to
staff-612@cs, before
the assignment is due. This e-mail should indicate the assignment, the
number of late days, the reason, and the people involved. If you have
remaining extension days, your request will be granted, independent
of the reason. We ask "why" for two reasons:
As with everything, we will try our best to be reasonable. At times we
might choose to allow more flexibility than is permitted under the
"letter of the law." This in no way affects our ability to enforce the
policy, to the letter, in the future. We want to remain reasonable,
not slaves to policy. This discretion rests entirely with the course staff.
Policy on the Presentation of Submitted Material
For electronic submission, we need to be able to identify each
component and do routine types of things. Our goal is to be able
to understand your system, build it, and test it as rapidly as
possible. The following are some useful guidelines:
Under no circumstances should you submit any assignment via e-mail.
In the past, under unusual circumstances, this practice actually
caused a substantial interruption in service for many SCS users,
due to server resource constraints.
We hate to sound picky about this type of thing -- it really isn't
our nature. Our goal isn't to take ruler and measure your margins, or
to get picky about configuration management in projects.
Instead, our goal is just to spend as little time as necessary searching
for lost pages or files, deciphering handwriting, and/or understanding
your work as is possible. Instead, we'd rather spend the time helping
you and making the course more rewarding.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3:00PM - 4:20PM, HH B103
This is an advanced course focusing on the design, implementation,
and management of distributed systems. It covers fundamental topics
such as concurrent programming in a distributed environment,
distributed objects, interprocess communication and coordination,
synchronization and election, distributed agreement, replicated data
management, checkpointing and recovery, and directory and discovery
services. It also covers the design and implementation of distributed
systems including shared memory, file systems, and databases.
15-410, 15-412, 18-347, or permission of the instructor
Coulouris, G., Dollimore, J., and Kindberg, T., Distributed Systems:
Concepts and Design, 3ed, Pearson Education/Addison-Wesley,
2001.
There will be supplemental reading assignments from sources outside
of your textbook. Whenever feasibly, these will be provided in
.pdf and .ps form via the course WWW site. Many such papers, as well
as other interesting reading, are already available via the course WWW
site.
Gregory Kesden
8020 Wean Hall
412.268.1590 (office)
412.687.6198 (home)
412.268.5576 (FAX)
Sule Yildirim
4222 Newell-Simon Hall
412.268.3132 (office)
Tests (60%):
The final course grade will be assigned using a weighted average of
assignment scores. The assignments will be weighted as shown in the
assignments section of this document.
This is a 12-unit course. We expect that your amortized investment in
the course will be approximately 12 hours/week. This may vary depending
on the project option that you select, your aptitude/mindset/habits, and
your individual goals. Historically speaking, in our experience, 12-unit
technical courses require closer to 15 hours/week. We don't think that
this is an unreasonable estimate, either.
The two principle methods of staff to student communication are
the following:
This may vary during the semester in response to the interests of
the class, new developments, &c, but this is the plan:
It is course policy that all of the work you submit for grading, or
in support of graded material, shall either be your own thought product
or clearly and specifically credited to the proper source. In other
words you must clearly and visibly provide proper attribution for ideas
and expressions that you borrow from others. This is true for both
exams and projects.
Unless otherwise specified, all assignment, or components thereof, that
are to be electronically submitted are due at 11:59PM on the due date.
Similary, assignments, or components thereof, that must be submitted
by other means are due at the beginning of class on the due date.
All assignments, whether submitted electronically or in hard-copy
must be presented in a professional way.
For hard copy submission (and electronic submission of printer-ready copy),
unless otherwise stated, the following are some minimum requirements.
They are designed to keep the components of your assignment assembled
during the review process, to give us room to make notes and comments,
as well as to help us to parse and understand your assignment without
difficulty.