Midterm Exam

The midterm exam will be in class on Monday, March 6th. It will be about four pages long, and you can expect to be asked to describe fundamental properties of distributed systems, sketch the architecture and interaction of specific system designs, and detail the operation of distributed algorithms.

The textbook chapters 1 through chapter 6.2, and also chapter 8.3 are fair game, along with any material from the project assignments.

A selection of good topics to study.

• Chapter 1: Definitions, objectives, metrics, and limitations of distributed systems.
• Chapter 2: Physical and logical architectures of distributed systems.
• Chapter 3: Process fundamentals, construction of clients and servers, server clustering methods and metrics.
• Chapter 4: Networking fundamentals, properties of TCP and UDP, remote procedure call mechanics and semantics (also Ch 8.3), Network File System (also Ch 2.4)
• Chapter 5: Naming properties and purposes, broadcast name lookups, centralized name servers, distributed naming systems.
• Chapter 6.1: Definition of time and clocks, properties of electronic and astronomical clocks, time synchronization techniques.

• Chapter 6.2: Logical clocks, totally ordered multicast, vector clocks

• Specific systems: World Wide Web, Network File System, ZeroMQ, Domain Name System, Chord, Network Time Protocol