Overview of the Class:

. goal of the class;

. list of papers;

. tentative schedule;
	- student presentations;

. projects, grading and exams;



Intro to Distributed Systems:

. Definitions of distributed systems;

. Types of distributed systems;
	by degree of coupling: 
		- multi-processors;
		- parallel systems;
		- LAN distributed;
		- WAN distributed;
		- disconnected;

	by hardware and OS architecture;

	by administration domains;

	by what you can do in each system;

	by the type of consistency provided;

. Characteristics of distributed systems;
	what makes distributed systems different from centralized ones;
		- consistency;
		- failure handling;
		- security;
		- administration;
			transparency:	location transparency;
					migration transparency;
					replication transparency;
					concurrency transparency;
					parallelism transparency;


. Architecture of distributed systems:  

	peer-to-peer;

	client/server;
		- multi-tier;

	mobile agents;


. Communication primitives:

	- TCP/IP;

	- UDP/IP;

	- Multimedia transfer protocols;

	- RPC;

	- Multicast and group communications;