Distributed Computer Systems

Syllabus

The syllabus, time requirements, grading policy, information about accommodations, and more can be found in our syllabus.

Grading

Your final grade for the course will be based on the following items:

• 50% Programming Projects (4)
  • 10% Liteminer (lab1 is 5% of Liteminer (so 0.5% of total grade))
  • 13.33% Tapestry (lab2 is 5% of Tapestry (so 0.66% of total grade))
  • 13.33% Raft
  • 13.33% PuddleStore
• 15% Homeworks (HW1+HW5: 3% (HW1 and HW5 are coupled with each other and both half of a homework grade), HW2: 3%, HW3: 3%, HW4:3%, HW6:3%)
• 10% Midterm
• 15% Final Exam
• 7% Post Lecture Quizzes
• 3% Course Participation

The Post Lecture Quizzes will be graded on correctness. You are allowed to missing 3 days Post Lecture Quizzes. We will use gradescope to collect these.

The Course Participation will be graded on participation -- so you get credits for both the right answer and the wrong answer. You are allowed to missing 3 days worth of participation points. For the synchronous section, this will administered using Top Hat during class. For the asynchronous section, we have a seperate Top Hat instance, you will be assigned questions after class and you have until the next class to complete them.

Note: initially we were planning to use Canvas for the PLQ and for the asynchronous-class participation. However, due some issues with canvas we have modified the setup. In particular, for PLQ we will use gradeschope. All class participation will go through Top Hat -- we have created different instance of Top Hat with different rules.

The written homework assignments will all be done individually. The programming programs will be completed in groups of two (2).

Textbook

You can follow the content of the course using Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (5th Edition). We will indicate besides each lecture below which sections of the textbook correspond to the lecture.

Programming Help

The TAs have put together two very useful guides to get started with Go and with Git. Check them out below:

• Get Going with Go
• Git Reference

More links:

• A Tour of Go
• Effective Go
• Introduction to Asynchronous Programming
• Profiling Go Programs
• Checking Test Coverage in Go

Capstone

For those taking the course as a capstone, you will required to implement additional features on the following projects: Tapestry, Raft, AND Puddlestore projects. In particular, for each of the three projects, you will be given a set of optional features (one or more additional features) -- you will have to pick one to implement.