BSc: Distributed And Network Programming

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Distributed and Network Programming

  • Course name: Distributed and Network Programming
  • Code discipline: XYZ
  • Subject area: xxx

Short Description

This course covers the following concepts: Network programming concepts: Layered architecture, TCP and UDP sockets, multithreaded servers; Distributed systems concepts: system architecture, inter-process communication, remote procedure calls, peer-to-peer systems, coordination, replication, and fault tolerance..

Prerequisites

Prerequisite subjects

  • Networks: 1) Understanding Application, Transport, and Network layers, 2) Basic socket programming experience
  • Operating systems

Prerequisite topics

Course Topics

Course Sections and Topics
Section Topics within the section
Introduction to subject, computer networks basics, transport layer protocols, and socket programming
  1. General introduction to the course
  2. Computer networks basic
  3. Socket programming
  4. UDP socket programming
  5. TCP socket programming
Multithreaded socket programming, RPCs, and distributed system architecture
  1. Multithreading and multithreaded socket programming
  2. Remote procedure calls (RPCs)
  3. Distributed system architectures
Coordination, consistency, and replication in distributed systems
  1. Clock synchronization algorithms (NTP, Berkeley)
  2. Logical clock (Lamport clocks)
  3. Mutual exclusion algorithms: permission-based, token-based
  4. Election algorithms: Bully, Ring
  5. Consistency models
  6. Replica management
  7. Consistency protocols
Fault tolerance and security in distributed systems
  1. Intro to fault tolerance: Failure models, Failure masking by redundancy
  2. Process resilience: process groups, process replication, consensus in faulty systems, failure detection
  3. Reliable group communication: atomic multicast,
  4. Distributed commit
  5. Recovery: checkpointing
  6. Intro to security: threats, design issues, cryptography
  7. Secure channels: authentication, message integrity and confidentiality, secure group communication
  8. Access control: general issues, firewalls, secure mobile code, denial of service
  9. Secure naming
  10. Security management: Key management, secure group management, authorization management

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

What is the main purpose of this course?

Distributed and networked systems have become an integral part of our life, we use various applications such as chatting, online transactions, or cloud storage apps. All these popular applications are supported by an infrastructure (of servers) that is organized based on some concepts of distributed systems. The purpose of this course is to provide the students with the necessary concepts, models, and real-world problem-solving techniques of network programming and distributed systems.

ILOs defined at three levels

Level 1: What concepts should a student know/remember/explain?

By the end of the course, the students should be able to ...

  • Concepts of network programming
  • Different distributed system architectures
  • Various synchronization and coordination techniques
  • Different consistency models and replication methods
  • Approaches to achieve fault tolerance and security in distributed systems

Level 2: What basic practical skills should a student be able to perform?

By the end of the course, the students should be able to ...

  • Difference between different transport protocols, when and why one is preferred over another
  • Difference between different distributed system architectures (centralized, decentralized, and hybrid)
  • How a mutual exclusion is achieved between concurrent servers (centralized, distributed, token-ring, and decentralized)
  • How a new leader is elected in peer-to-peer systems (bully, ring)
  • How to achieve a consistent replicas across distributed systems (consistency models and protocols, content replication and placement)
  • Some methods to achieve the fault tolerance in distributed systems

Level 3: What complex comprehensive skills should a student be able to apply in real-life scenarios?

By the end of the course, the students should be able to ...

  • Building a custom application protocols on top of the existing transport protocols
  • Writing multithreaded server and client apps with sockets
  • Using RPC for inter-process communication: command execution, file transfer
  • Building peer-to-peer systems with distributed protocol such as Chord
  • Building fault-tolerant systems with failure detection and leader election

Grading

Course grading range

Grade Range Description of performance
A. Excellent 90-100 -
B. Good 75-89 -
C. Satisfactory 60-74 -
D. Poor 0-59 -

Course activities and grading breakdown

Activity Type Percentage of the overall course grade
Laboratory assignments 55%
Final exam 35%
Attendance 10%

Recommendations for students on how to succeed in the course

Resources, literature and reference materials

Open access resources

  • Textbook: Maarten Van Steen, and Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Distributed systems (3rd Edition) Leiden, The Netherlands: Maarten van Steen, 2017. Available online: https://www.distributed-systems.net/
  • Reference: George F. Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, and Tim Kindberg. Distributed systems: concepts and design (5th Edition) Addision Wesley, 2012. Available online: https://www.cdk5.net/wp/
  • Reference: Sukumar Ghosh. Distributed systems: an algorithmic approach (2nd Edition) Chapman&Hall /CRC, Author’s own course material, Spring 2015. Available online: http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~ghosh/16615.html

Closed access resources

Software and tools used within the course

Teaching Methodology: Methods, techniques, & activities

Activities and Teaching Methods

Activities within each section
Learning Activities Section 1 Section 2 Section 3 Section 4
Development of individual parts of software product code 1 1 1 1
Homework and group projects 1 1 1 1
Testing (written or computer based) 1 1 1 1
Oral polls 1 1 1 1
Discussions 1 1 1 1

Formative Assessment and Course Activities

Ongoing performance assessment

Section 1

Activity Type Content Is Graded?
Question What are the distributed systems? 1
Question Give an example of distributed systems. 1
Question What are the advantages of layered architecture? 1
Question What are the roles of transport protocols? 1
Question How the TCP and UDP differ from each other? When one is preferred over the other? 1
Question What is socket programming? 1
Question How socket programming is different for UDP and TCP? 1
Question Write a simple UDP/TCP client-server echo program 0
Question Write a simple chatting program using UDP/TCP sockets 0
Question Given the simple echo server program, apply socket timeouts and catch timeout exceptions 0
Question Write a UDP-based reliable file transfer protocol 0
Question Write a program that parallelly executes the CPU-bound tasks using multiple processes 0

Section 2

Activity Type Content Is Graded?
Question How the threads differ from processes? 1
Question What are the I/O and CPU-bound tasks? 1
Question For what kind of tasks, using threads is preferred than using processes? 1
Question What is a remote procedure call? 1
Question What are some well-known distributed system architectures? 1
Question Discuss the structured and unstructured decentralized architectures. 1
Question You have a list of large numbers, and you need to find if they are prime or not. Would you use multithreading, multiprocessing, or sequential programming in order to complete the task asap? Prove it in practice. 0
Question You need to send multiple requests to a server and receive responses. Assume there is a few msecs of delay before you receive the response from the server. Would you use multithreading, multiprocessing, or sequential programming in order to complete the task asap? Prove it in practice. (Order of the requests/responses doesn't matter) 0
Question Discuss two ways of creating the threads using threading module in Python: 1) passing the worker function as a target, 2) subclassing the Thread class 0
Question Given the function implemented locally, make it available to be called through RPC from remote process? Use xmlRPC. 0

Section 3

Activity Type Content Is Graded?
Question How NTP protocol works? 1
Question How Berkeley protocol works? 1
Question Discuss the mutual exclusion algorithms. 1
Question Discuss the permanent and server-initiated replicas and their difference 1
Question Explain the Primary-backup protocol. 1
Question Given three machines with drifting clocks, adjust their clocks using Berkeley algorithm. 0
Question Explain how Bully algorithm for election works 0
Question Explain how Ring algorithm for election works 0
Question Explain the centralized (permission-based) method of mutual exclusion 0

Section 4

Activity Type Content Is Graded?
Question Discuss the failure models 1
Question Discuss different failure masking techniques by redundancy 1
Question What is k-fault tolerant group? 1
Question What is general model of failure detection? 1
Question Explain basic reliable multicasting 1
Question Explain what is authentication 1
Question Explain what are message confidentiality and integrity 1
Question Same as above 0

Final assessment

Section 1

  1. Describe an advantage of layered architecture?
  2. Describe the differences between TCP and UDP protocols?
  3. Provide examples when using UDP can be more reasonable than TCP?
  4. Describe how UDP and TCP socket programming differ from each other?

Section 2

  1. Discuss the differences between the threads and processes.
  2. What is the Race condition?
  3. Discuss the ways to protect the shared data from the race condition
  4. You're given the worker function that just sleeps for a second and quits, implement the same behavior in a subclass of the Thread.
  5. Discuss the RPC and its advantages over using the low-level socket programming?
  6. Discuss the decentralized architecture: structured and unstructured p2p systems.

Section 3

  1. Discuss NTP and Berkeley protocols for synchronization and explain their key difference
  2. Discuss permission-based and token-based solution for mutual exclusion.
  3. Discuss content replication: permanent, server-initiated, and client-initiated replicas.
  4. Explain the Primary-backup protocol, its advantages and disadvantages.

Section 4

  1. Same as above

The retake exam

Section 1

Section 2

Section 3

Section 4