Basic Information:

• Instructor: Yannis Smaragdakis, DES 245, 346-3473
  
yannis@cs.uoregon.edu


• Suggested Textbooks:
Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg, Addison-Wesley
Distributed Systems Tanenbaum and Van Steen, Prentice Hall
Multithreaded Programming with Pthreads, Lewis and Berg, Prentice Hall
Pthreads Programming Nichols, Buttlar, Farrell, O'Reilly
Operating Systems Concepts, Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne, Sixth Edition, John Wiley and Sons

 
• Syllabus

Class photo

Lecture Topics:

• Class introduction, Distributed Systems overview
  
• Introduction to thread programming (1+ lecture)
• Condition variables and monitor-style programming. Best practices and techniques (1+ lecture)
  
• Thread design patterns (1- lecture)
• Pthreads tutorial (1- lecture)
• Implementation of thread libraries (1 lecture)
• Concurrent programming ideas: higher-level constructs (1 lecture)
  
• Webservers' architecture (1 lecture)
• Programming distributed systems (1 lecture)
• Remote procedure call mechanisms and middleware (2 lectures)
• Distributed file systems, leases, case studies (2 lectures)
• Time and synchronization in distributed environments (1 lecture)
• Distributed Agreement: mutual exclusion, voting, consensus, byzantine generals (1 lecture)
• Distributed transactions?
• Distributed Shared Memory? Web services? Peer-to-peer?
  

Handouts, Papers

• An Introduction to Programming with Threads, Birrell
• Flash: an Efficient and Portable Web Server, Pai et al. See also the talk slides.
• A Note on Distributed Computing by Waldo, Wyant, Wollrath, Kendall
• The Sprite file system (recommended paper: Caching in the Sprite Distributed File System by Nelson et al.)
• Implementing Remote Procedure Calls by Birrell and Nelson

Pointers to Technical Information:

• JPEG manipulation:
• www.ijg.org
• Source code library for JPEG manipulation (follow installation instructions to compile it)
• Client program using the library to create low-quality JPEG images from regular JPEGs. Untar together with the library and follow the instructions in README.lowres
  
  
• HTTP, Web Servers, and more:
• The C10K problem page is an excellent resource for a discussion of server scalability
  
• HTTP specification
• micro_httpd: a tiny HTTP server
• Socket programming tutorial, and another one
• Code examples in Stevens's Unix Network Programming

• Pthreads Resources (a little outdated but still a starting point--do a web search and you can find better):
• news://comp.programming.threads
• Threads FAQ
• LinuxThreads (this has long been the standard Pthreads package distributed with Linux, but with latest kernels new support has been added and different libraries take advantage of it for better performance). Here is a good overview of the state-of-the-art in Linux Pthreads support.
• The GNU Pth Portable Threads package