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Course Description
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Grading
Grading Statistics
Academic Integrity
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:
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.
If we receive by email a question that should have been posted to the newsgroup, we will simply forward it to the newsgroup.
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.
To submit an assignment (homework or project) that involves programming,
zip -r
to zip the entire directory. This way
we can run unzip
on all the .zip files without filename conflicts.
If you are a CSE graduate student, you should already have an account on the Suns. If you are not a CSE graduate student and do not have an account on the CSE Dept's Sun workstations, please send me a message, and I will get an account for you.
You do not need a separate account to use the NT machines; for details, see the Grad NT Lab Home Page.
Homeworks | 26% |
Midterm | 17% |
Final | 23% |
Project (part 1) | 10% |
Project (part 2) | 24% |
Homework Weights
Item: | hw1 | hw2 | hw3 | hw4 | hw5 |
Weight: | 0.06 | 0.06 | 0.05 | 0.03 | 0.06 |
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.
Statistics
The following information may be slightly inaccurate, due to score
adjustments, late submissions, etc.
Item | Mean | Std.Dev. | Histogram |
hw1 (out of 100) | 100.4 | 18.2 | |
proj1 (out of 100) | 97.3 | 3.0 | |
exam1 (out of 80) | 49.9 (62%) | 10.1 | histogram |
hw2 (out of 45) | 39.6 | 2.7 | |
hw3 (out of 80) | 69.0 | 19.9 | |
proj2 (out of 100) | 100 | 5.8 | |
hw4 (out of 40) | 22.0 | 8.4 | |
hw5 (out of 70) | 42.6 | 10.0 | |
final (out of 80) | 54.5 (68%) | 16.0 | histogram |
If you have a physical, psychological, medical or learning disability that may impact on your ability to carry out assigned course work, I would urge that you contact the staff in the Disabled Student Services office (DSS), Room 133 Humanities, 632-6748/TDD. DSS will review your concerns and determine, with you, what accommodations are necessary and appropriate. All information and documentation of disability is confidential.
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: