Final Exam

The final exam will be on Monday, May 4th at 10:30 in our usual classroom. It will be about six 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, detail the operation of distributed algorithms.

The textbook chapters 1 through chapter 7.3, also 8.3 and 8.5 are fair game, along with the other assigned readings and material from the project assignments.

A selection of good topics to review:

• 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: Time, clocks, and synchronization. Logical clocks, totally ordered multicast, vector clocks, causally ordered multicast. Mutual exclusion. Elections.
• Chapter 6: Naming properties and purposes, broadcast name lookups, centralized name servers, distributed naming systems.
• Chapter 7: Replication strategies, client centric consistency, data centric consistency.
• Chapter 8.5: Two phase commit.
• Specific systems: World Wide Web, Network File System, Domain Name System, Chord, Network Time Protocol, HDFS, HTCondor, Makeflow, Chain Replication