From: streppel@fwi.uva.nl (Hans Streppel (Academie voor Informatica))
Subject: course on Distributed Systems
Organization: FWI, University of Amsterdam
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1992 12:00:13 GMT


Distributed Systems, a 3-day Course.


Amsterdam, November 30 - December 1, 2  1992


This course is aimed at researchers and system developers with interest in 
distributed systems and with some knowledge of the principles of (sequential) 
operating systems. 

The goal of this course is to study the state-of-the-art in system software for 
distributed computing systems. The course will focus on distributed operating 
systems, servers (eg file servers), and programming languages. The course will 
address design principles and also study practical examples. 

Overview of the course

The course takes three days and consists of the lectures listed below. In
addition the Amoeba distributed system, which was developed by prof.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum and his group of the Vrije Universiteit, will be
demonstrated.


Programme

Introduction
-	Overview of the course
-	Hardware (multiprocessors vs distributed systems)
-	Software (network OS vs distributed OS)
-	Design issues

Communication
-	Client-server model
-	Message passage issues
-	Remote Procedure Call
-	Group communication (broadcasting)

Synchronization
-	Clock synchronization
-	Mutual exclusion synchronization
-	Atomic transactions
-	Deadlocks

Processes
-	Processes & threads
-	System models
	-	workstation model
	-	poolprocessor model
	-	using idle workstations
-	Load balancing and sharing
-	Scheduling

File Systems
-	Introduction
-	Design
	-	interface directory & file service
	-	file sharing semantics
-	Implementation
	-	structure
	-	caching
	-	replication
Example: Andrew file system

Case Studies
Amoeba
	-	architecture
	-	microkernel
	-	capabilities
	-	communication primitives
	-	Amoeba's servers
Demonstration of Amoeba system at Vrije Universiteit

Mach
	-	communication primitives
	-	threads
	-	virtual memory
	-	Unix emulation

Distributed Programming - Basics
-	Classes of applications
-	Distributed programming
-	Parallelism
-	Interprocess communication
-	Example parallel application
-	Examples of message passing languages (Ada, Concurrent C)

Distributed Programming - Advanced Models
-	Shared virtual memory
-	Linda (Tuple Space)
-	Orca (shared data-objects)
-	Fault-tolerance using Argus


Organization

The main lecturers of this course are dr. H. E. Bal (Vrije Universiteit) and  
 dr. Robbert van Renesse (Cornell University / Vrije Universiteit).

Henri Bal is a faculty member of the Department of Mathematics and
Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. His research interests 
include programming languages, parallel and distributed programming, and 
compilers.
Since 1985, he has been working on Orca, a new programming language for 
implementing parallel applications on distributed systems. Orca has been 
implemented on top of the Amoeba distributed operating system.
Bal is the author of the book "Programming Distributed Systems". He has been a 
visiting researcher at MIT, the University of Arizona, and Imperial College.

Robbert van Renesse is one of the important persons behind the Amoeba 
distributed operating system, of which he did a substantial part of the design  
and implementation.
He was chairman of a successful European committee that built an 
operating system distributed over several countries. He also worked on the 
management of such a system, and later continued his management research in the 
ISIS project at Cornell University.  After that Van Renesse has worked at AT&T  
the Plan 9 operating system, which can be viewed as the distributed successor tothe Unix system. Currently Van Renesse is back at Cornell working on a
successor to the ISIS distributed system.

The course will be held at the Vrije Universiteit, Department of Mathematics 
and Computer Science, Amsterdam.


The Academy voor Informatica, specialising in post-graduate courses in computer 
science, is run jointly by the Vrije Universiteit, the University of Amsterdam
and Utrecht University.

Further information: Further details can be obtained from Drs. J.A.J. Streppel, Academie voor Informatica 
Email: avi@fwi.uva.nl 
Phone: +31 20 525 75 94 
Fax: +31 20 525 74 90 

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