Distributed Systems

Dr Ian Taylor

The distributed systems course is divided between Omer Rana, Andrew Harrison and myself. I give around 2/3^rds of the course and Omer and Andrew Harrison give around 1/3^rd. Below are the resources available to the students:

Course Overview

For a full list of the lectures for the both the BSc and MSc courses, see HERE.

Lecture Slides

Click HERE for PDF files containing the slides from the lectures given.
Click HERE for directory of the PPT files of the slides from the lectures.
Click HERE for Andrew's Course Material

Tutorials

Click HERE for the Web Services and Web 2.0 Tutorials
Click HERE for the Jini Tutorial
Click HERE for the Jxta Tutorial

Notes

Click HERE the extensive notes for selected lectures.

Other

For Omer’s notes see HERE.

This course gives a broad overview of current techniques used within distributed systems. It has a strong focus on real-world examples that exist today, so if you’ve ever used KaZaA, Morpheus, Limewire, Gnutella, SET@Home or Napster then this is your chance to find out how they work! There are examples of: peer-to-peer applications and infrastructures including Napster, SETI@Home, ICQ, Gnutella, Freenet and Jxta; distributed object systems e.g. Jini; document oriented computing e.g. Web Services; Grid computing e.g. Globus 2.x and OGSA/WSRF; and user environments, such as Portals and Problem Solving Environments. These are described at various levels of detail during the lectures and discussed in the context of a generalized taxonomy, discussed in the first lecture. This taxonomy serves as a placeholder for the distributed systems presented and gives an overview of the organizational differences between the various approaches. Most of the systems are discussed at a high level, particularly discussing the organization and topologies of the distributed resources.

The following books are recommended for further reading but are not essential.