CSE533: Fall 2001: Announcements
Scott Stoller
31 Dec
Scores: Here are Everyone's Scores on All
Assignments. This enables you to check that we accurately recorded
your scores. The table is sorted by score on the midterm. You know all
of your own scores (or you will after you pick up your remaining
assignments from my office), so you can easily recognize your line in the
table.
27 Dec
Grades: I added grading statistics for all remaining items. proj2
scores and course grades have been sent by email. You may pick up your
hw4, hw5, and final exam from my office at your convenience. If you have
questions about the grading of these last items, it's not too late to
ask; course grades will be changed if appropriate. As I mentioned in
class, I welcome your feedback about the course.
21 Dec
Exam: Final Exam Solution is available.
17 Dec
Exam: As mentioned earlier, the final exam may cover all of the
course material (with the two small exceptions noted in class about 2
weeks ago), but most (possibly all) of it will be about material not
covered by the midterm. One more comment: there will be no questions
about synchronization of real-time clocks.
Office hour: I will have an office hour on Thu, 20 Dec, at 3:30pm,
in case people have questions while preparing for the final exam.
Homework: Homework 5 Solution is available.
12 Dec
Homework: Homework 4 Solution is available.
11 Dec
Office hour: I will have an office hour on Wed, 12 Dec, at 3pm.
Devhood: This is a general announcement, not particularly related
to the course. People interested in software development on Microsoft
platforms might want to look at DevHood.
10 Dec
Final Exam: The final exam will be on Friday, 21 December,
11am-1:30pm, in our usual classroom (Harriman Hall 108).
4 Dec
Homework: Homework 5 is available.
Extra Credit: The extra credit mentioned in the earliest
announcement on the project page can be submitted, at the
latest, together with proj2.
3 Dec
Final Exam: It is important to bring to the final exam: the
textbook [CDK] and the handouts on leader election [Chow and Johnson] and
Timewheel [Fetzer, Mishra, and Cristian].
3 Dec
Demo: No one objected to concurrent demos, so we will try it.
Each team should sign up ASAP for a 45-minute timeslot during one of
these intervals:
- Mon, Dec 10, 2:00pm-7:00pm
- Tue, Dec 11, 4:00pm-5:30pm
- Wed, Dec 12, 4:00pm-6:00pm
To sign up, send email to Fanglu, stating your first-choice
and second-choice timeslots, and indicating where you plan to hold the
demo (e.g., depending on whether you want to use a Sun or PC). Most
demos can probably be held in the T.A. office room (Room 1207, Sun
workstation) or the Grad NT Lab (Room 1239, PCs).
Schedule: As announced by email, there is no lecture today. Use
the time to do hw4.
Homework: Homework 4 is available.
Handout: I finally found an on-line version of the
pre-Thanksgiving handout about Timewheel. I made a link to it in the
bibliographic entry below.
26 Nov
Handout: The pre-Thanksgiving handout is:
Christof Fetzer, Shivakant Mishra, and Flaviu Cristian. The Timewheel Asynchronous Group
Communication Protocol. U.C. San Diego, Computer Science and
Engineering Department, Tech Report CSE95-411, 1995.
The following two papers are subsets of it:
S. Mishra, C. Fetzer and F. Cristian, The Timewheel Asynchronous Atomic
Broadcast Protocol. Proceedings of the 1997 International Conference on
Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications, Las
Vegas, NV (June 1997), 1239--1248.
S. Mishra, C. Fetzer, and F. Cristian, The Timewheel Group Membership
Protocol. Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Workshop on Fault-tolerant Parallel
and Distributed Systems, Orlando, FL (April 1998).
Erratum: In today's lecture, I attempted to correct the definition
of weak atomicity by adding the disjunct (forall q in g' : q dlvr u in
g). I should have added the disjunct (forall q in (g' intersect g) : q
dlvr u in g).
Homework: Homework 3 Solution is available.
I added grading statistics for hw3.
15 Nov
Homework: I added grading statistics for hw2.
10 Nov
Homework: In problem 1, I had in mind concurrent RMIs by the same
client on the same object. In problem 2, there are multiple ways
that a process can obtain reomte references. It is conceivable that the
answer depends on how the remote references are obtained (e.g., directly
from registry, or in the arguments or return value of an RMI). For any
possible combinations (of ways of obtaining the two references to stub
objects that you compare with ==) that you don't explicitly try in your
design and experiments, you should argue that, for any reasonable
implementation of RMI, the answer would be the same as for one of the
combinations that you did try.
8 Nov
Exam1: I revised my solution to problem 1. It now contains a more
detailed description of the simple and inefficient protocol.
6 Nov
Homework: Homework 3 is available.
Exam1: I added a histogram of the scores (see Statistics, above).
This also answers questions about the maximum score.
Exam1: To confirm my answer to 7b (namely, that revalidation of
files after a client reboot is done on-demand), see: J. H. Howard et al.,
Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System. ACM Transactions on
Computer Systems, Feb. 1988, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 51-81. It says (p. 59):
"When a workstation is rebooted, Venus considers all cached files and
directories suspect and generates a cache validation request for the
first use of each such entry."
5 Nov
Exam1: I added grading statistics about exam1 (see above). I will
return the graded exams during today's class.
2 Nov
Exam: Exam 1 Solution is available.
1 Nov
Office hour: My office hour on Nov 2 is moved to: Nov 1,
2pm-2:30pm, and Nov 2, 8:40am-9:40am.
31 Oct
Homework: Homework 2 Solution is available.
24 Oct
Office Hours: I will present the Ongoing Research Seminar on 26
Oct. My office hour that day is rescheduled to 9am-10am.
JBuilder: JBuilder5 Personal Edition CDs are available! Stop by
my office if you want one. Apparently the CD contains versions for
Windows, Linux, and Solaris.
21 Oct
Exam: The midterm exam covers material up to and including Clock
Synchronization. The midterm exam will not contain questions related to
the project; the final exam will.
Homework: Homework 2 is available.
18 Oct
Demo: See additional info about demos on the project page.
15 Oct
Reading: Read [CDK, chapter 10]. This course does not cover [CDK,
chapter 9].
12 Oct
Midterm: Reminder: the midterm will be on 2 November 2001.
5 Oct
JBuilder: JBuilder5 CDs should be available in about a week.
21 Sep
Project: I added some details under How to
Submit an Assignment. Also, remember (from the project handout) that
grading reflects readability of the code (modular design, indentation,
meaningful variable names, etc.) and the quality of the documentation
(comments in code, design.txt, instructions.txt).
21 Sep
Project: I added some important comments to the Project Page.
Hw1: I added grading statistics about hw1. You can get your
graded hw1 from Fanglu during his office hours next week; or, you can get
it in class the following week. Unusually clear code and documentation
earned extra credit.
Handout: There was a handout on Sun NFS in class today.
If you didn't receive it, please ask me or a classmate for a copy.
17 Sep
Reading: Read [CDK, chapter 8].
Reading: Read [CDK, chapters 4-5]. You should be familiar with
Operating Sytems [CDK, chapter 6], but we won't discuss it in class.
This class does not directly cover security, because cse508 does. If you
haven't taken cse508, you might benefit from reading [CDK, chapter 7],
since the project involves indirect use of digital signatures.
Midterm: Unless I receive strenuous objections in the next few
days, the midterm will be on 2 November 2001.
10 Sep
Academic Integrity: I expanded the section on Academic Integrity.
6 Sep
Computers and Accounts: I added a section on Computers and Accounts.
Newsgroup: If you have trouble reading the newsgroup, see the new
comments above about setting your newsgroups
server.
5 Sep
Hw1: Simply killing server processes is probably not an effective
way to test that both of the time-outs in your client code work
correctly. For some testcases, you may want to modify the client code,
the server code, or both. Explain such modifications in test.txt.
Teams: I plan to form teams tonight for students who did not form
teams by themselves. If you have a last-minute team to announce, please
send me the information today.
Project: For convenient future reference, project announcements
will be added to the Project Page (there is a
link to it in the Table of Contents of
this page).
4 Sep
Accounts: If you are not a CS graduate student and do not have an
account on the CS Dept Sun workstations, please send me a message, and I
will get an account for you. (CS graduate students should already have
accounts.)
JBuilder5: The department expects the JBuilder5 CDs to be
available in about 2 weeks, pending Borland's final approval of our
request.
3 Sep
Newsgroup: I added information about the Course Newsgroup.
31 Aug
Hw1: test.txt needs to contain only testcases with 1 client; this
is just to keep test.txt small (it can grow rapidly, if you use lots of
println's and include the output of your program in the file). However,
we will look at your code to see whether it would work with multiple
clients; if we have any doubts, we will run it with multiple clients
ourselves, or ask you to do so for us.
28 Aug
Office Hours: I added info about office hours (near top of page).
27 Aug
Questionnaire: If you didn't fill out this questionnaire in class today, please fill it out
now. You can edit it and email it to me, or print it and put it under my
office door or give it to me in class on Friday. Remember: KLOC =
thousand line of code.
Policies: I just updated the section on Academic Integrity.
Project: I just updated the "Teams" section of the Project Description. The new version says "(ver 27
Aug, 17:35)" near the top.
Office Hours: I added information about my
office hours.
Project: I just added Project Grading
Policies to this page and a fifth item to the "What to Submit"
section of the Project Description.
Reading: Read [CDK, chapters 1-3]. ("CDK" denotes the course
textbook.)
Homework: Homework1 is now available.
Scott Stoller
Last modified: Fri Mar 11 08:47:17 EST 2005