COMP 420: Syllabus - Spring 2005

Instructor

Peter Druschel, druschel@cs.rice.edu, DH 3007, x4664.

Lectures

TTh 2:30-3:50pm, DH1046

Office hours

By appointment (please use email).

Teaching Assistant

Dan Sandler, dsandler@cs.rice.edu, DH3010.

Questions and Answers

Questions of general interest should be posted to the rice.owlnews.comp420 newsgroup. Answers will be posted as soon as possible. Other questions should be directed to the labbies by sending mail to comp420.

Secretary

Melissa Cisneros-Nunez, mcisnero@cs.rice.edu, DH 3122, x4834.

Prerequisites

COMP 421, or permission of instructor.

Readings

I highly recommend that you refer to one of the first two books for in-depth reading of the material covered in class. You might also want to refer to one or more of the other books for background. We will also provide additional reading materials.

Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms. Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Maarten van Steen. Prentice-Hall, 2002. ISBN 0-13-088893-1.

Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design. G. Coulouris, J. Dollimore and T. Kindberg. Third Edition. Addison-Wesley, 2001. ISBN 0201-619-180.

Distributed Operating Systems and Algorithms. R. Chow, T. Johnson. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1997. ISBN 0-201-49838-3.

Distributed Systems. Sape Mullender (Editor). Second Edition. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1993. ISBN 0-201-62427-3. A very good collection of articles by leading researchers in the area.

Building Secure and Reliable Network Applications. K.P. Birman. Manning Publications Co., 1996. ISBN1-884777-29-5. A very good overview on distributed systems and how to make them reliable.

Theory and Practice in Distributed Systems. K.P. Birman, F. Mattern, and A. Schiper. Springer Verlag, LNCS 938, 1995. Lecture notes for a course in Distributed Systems.

Lecture Notes

Lecture notes and handouts will be made available on the Web.These notes are not necessarily self-contained, complete, or coherent. They are meant to aid you in your own note taking. They are certainly not a substitute for attending class.

Project

There will be a modest programming project used to explore and illustrate concepts covered in the lectures.

Exams

There will be two test, one around the middle of the semester and one at the end, each covering material from the first and second half of the semester, respectively. The exams will be take-home and open book, and will cover material from lecture, required readings, and the project. There may also be some homework assignments.

Honor Code Policy

All assignments in the course are conducted under the Rice Honor Code. Students are encouraged to talk to each other, the labbies, the instructor, or anyone else about the assignments. Consulting another student's homework solution is prohibited, and submitted solutions may not be copied from any source. However, students are allowed to incorporate existing code from any source into their project components, provided that they disclose the nature and source of the incorporated code in the design documentation.

Grading

A tentative composition of the grade is 40% for the project assignment, and 60% for the exams.

Students with Disabilities

Any student with a documented disability needing academic adjustments or accommodations is requested to speak with me during the first two weeks of class. All discussions will remain confidential. Students with disabilities will need to also contact Disability Support Services in the Ley Student Center.