Admas University

School of Postgraduate Studies

Course Outline

Course Title: Distributed Systems

Course Code: CS 625
Credit hour: 3
Prerequisites: None
Course Description
This Course is intended to introduce to students the current developments in distributed s ystems,
their construction, issues that are involved in building reliable distributed systems, and possible
applications of distributed systems.
Learning Outcomes
At the end of this course, students will be able to
 Understand issues in developing distributed systems
 Explain
- how communication is handled in distributed systems
 Realize issues and difficulties in clock synchronization over several machines
 Learn the different methods that are used in handling consistency and replication and
how fault tolerant systems are built
Course Content
1. Introduction
 Introduction and Definition
 Goals of a Distributed System
 Types of Distributed System
2. Architectures
 Architectural Styles
 System Architecture
3. Processes
 Thread and their implementation
 Anatomy of clients

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  Servers and Design Issues
 Code Migration
4. Communication
 Network Protocols and Standards
 Remote Procedure Call
 Message-Oriented Communication
 Stream-Oriented communication
 Multicast communication
5. Naming
 Names, Identifiers, and Addresses
 Flat Naming
 Structured Naming
 Attribute-Based Naming
6. Synchronization
 Clock Synchronization
 Logical Clocks
 Mutual Exclusion
 Election algorithms
7. Consistency and Replication
 Reasons for Replication
 Data-Centric Consistency Models
 Client-Centric Consistency Models
 Replica Management
 Consistency Protocols
8. Fault Tolerance
 Introduction to Fault Tolerance
 Process Resilience
 Reliable Client-Server Communication
 Reliable Group Communication
 Distributed Commit
 Recovery
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Teaching Strategy
This course will be offered through lectures, presentations, class discussions, laboratory
reports and group work.

Method of Assessment
 Assignment…………………………………………. 20%
 Group work and presentation……………………. 30%
 Final Exam………………………………………… 50%

Teaching Support and Inputs for each content

Textbook:
 S. Tanenbaum and Maarten van Steen, Distributed Systems, Principles and Paradigms,
Prentice Hall, 2nd edition, 2006.

Reading Materials
 G. Coulouris, J. Dollimore, and T. Kindberg, Distributed Systems, Concepts and Design,
Addison Wesley, 4th edition, 2005.
 S. Tannenbaum, Computer Networks, Prentice Hall, 4th edition, 2003.
 S. Mullender, Distributed Systems, 2nd edition, Addison-Wesley, 199