CSE533: Network Programming
Fall 2001
Scott Stoller

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T.A.: Fanglu Guo

Class: Monday and Friday, 12:40pm-2:00pm. Harriman Hall 108.

Instructor's Office Hours: Monday and Friday, 2:00pm-3:00pm. Computer Science 1429.

T.A.'s Office Hours: Tuesday and Wednesday, 4:00pm-5:00pm. Computer Science 2110.

We will cover the following core topics:

• System models: timing, failures,
• Communication paradigms: messages, RPC, RMI, publish-subscribe, ...
• Distributed file systems.
• Logical clocks, consistent states, snapshot algorithms.
• Mutual exclusion, leader election.
• Group communication, including reliable multicast.

If time permits, we will explore additional topics, such as distributed shared memory.

The primary textbook is

George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, and Tim Kindberg. Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, 3rd edition. Addison-Wesley, 2001.

The coursework includes homeworks, a project, a midterm exam, and a final exam. Most homeworks will be written problems. The project involves a significant amount of programming in Java. Students are expected to be familiar with these languages, though not necessarily with the networking APIs. Students will learn those APIs through the programming assignments.

Extensive on-line documentation of Java networking APIs is available in the Java 2 SDK Documentation (e.g., click on "Java 2 Platform API Specification" and then on package "java.net"). For students desiring a more tutorial presentation, several textbooks are available, such as

Merlin Hughes, Michael Shoffner, Derek Hamner. Java Network Programming : A Complete Guide to Networking, Streams, and Distributed Computing, 2nd edition. Manning Publishing Co., 1999.

There is a link to the course newsgroup in the Table of Contents. You should be able to read the newsgroup in netscape by clicking on that link. If it doesn't work, check that your news server is news.sunysb.edu, with the default news port (port 119); in netscape, use Edit -> Preferences -> Mail&Newsgroups (click on the triangle) -> Newsgroups Servers. Or you can read the newsgroup using GNUS, an emacs-based news reader.

• Put all files (code and documentation) into a .zip file, and email it to stoller AT cs DOT sunysb DOT edu, and

• Put hardcopy of the documentation (user manual, design document, etc.) under the door of Room 1429. Save a tree! Do not submit printouts of your code!

• Put all of your files into directory with a unique name (e.g., your userid) and use zip -r to zip the entire directory. This way we can run unzip on all the .zip files without filename conflicts.

• Don't include .class files in the .zip file. Remember that your instructions.txt should describe how to compile your system.

• Try to keep the directory structure simple.

You do not need a separate account to use the NT machines; for details, see the Grad NT Lab Home Page.

Project Grading Policies: Each student receives individual scores for the project. Often, members of a team will receive the same scores, but if there is evidence (from the description of contributions in the project submission, the demo, or other sources) that team members did not contribute equally, their scores will reflect this. Students are encouraged to keep track of their contributions carefully throughout the semester.

Each team member is responsible for ensuring that he or she contributes. If you believe that your teammates are preventing you from contributing, discuss the situation with the instructor immediately; if you wait until near the end of the project, it will be too late to remedy the situation, and you will receive low scores for the project.

Discussing programming assignments with other people is fine. However, each person (or team, as appropriate) must write its own code and documentation. Showing your own (or your team's) code or documentation to members of other teams, giving it to them, or making it accessible to them (e.g., by making the files world-readable) is academic dishonesty.

In general, using code from textbooks, programming tutorials, etc., is acceptable provided:

1. the code solves the problem well (clearly, efficiently, etc.). For example, it is a bad idea to use code that solves a more general problem and consequently is significantly more complicated or less efficient than necessary.
2. you supply a reference to the source of the code (a book, URL, ...), and indicate clearly which part of the code is from each source.
3. you thoroughly understand all of the code that you submit. We may ask you to come and explain exactly how your submitted code works, regardless of whether you wrote the code yourself or got it from another source. You should be able to convince us that you could re-write that code or similar code from scratch, if needed. Otherwise, your assignment will be graded as if that code were missing.