• Operating systems and data communications:
  • basic concepts
  • central OS and comm. services
• Remote communication (RPC, RMI), message passing
• (Courses: Concurrent Programming, Intro. to Data Communications, Operating Systems)

• Can present, based on case descriptions, the basics, goals and challenges of distribution.
• Can describe and give examples of the concepts of transparency, heterogeneity, openness, scalability and consistency.
• Can give a justified definition for the term "distributed system".

• Can give a justified description of the effect that concurrency, partitioning and replication has on the availability, performance and scalability of a service.
• Can qualitatively estimate the benefits and disadvantages of distributing an application.
• Can explain the meaning of distributed time, concurrency and non-determinism.

• Can evaluate the performance and scalability of different distribution solutions by using load and queuing models.
• Can evaluate the reliability and fault tolerance of different solutions.
• Is aware of security-related threats.

• Can characterize the common goals of network operating systems, distributed operating systems and middleware, and describe their differences.
• Can describe vertical distribution.

• Can describe those hardware architectures, operating system and middleware level software architectures, and application level architecture models that are central to distribution.
• Can justify the interdependencies of different solutions and their effects on the application level.

Coordination of  system and communications

Distributed decision making

• The principles, unreliability and inexactness  of messaging services (Courses: Concurrent Programming, Intro. to Data Communications)
• Implementation principles of inter-process communication, IPC (Course: Operating Systems)
• The concept of a transaction

• Can explain clock synchronization, and the need and working (algorithms) for logical scalar and vector clocks.
• Can describe the basic concepts and at least one algorithm for each of the following topics:   
  • multicast and its implementation
  • defining global state
  • distributed decision making, mutual exclusion and election, transaction handling
• Can explain transaction serializability and how to implement it by using locks.

• Can implement as an algorithm the total and causal ordering of events, distributed snapshot, mutual exclusion and decision making.
• Can justify why the algorithms work and what is required for them to work, and evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithms in different environments.
• Can describe the operation of a distributed transaction and how to implement serializability by using locks and timestamps.

• Is familiar with recent literature in the field.
• Can apply formal methods to prove the correctness of algorithms related to the topic.
• Is aware of more advanced methods in how to implement serializability of transactions in a distributed environment.

• Knows why objects are replicated and how replicated objects are implemented.
• Can explain how consistency problems emerge, describe the differences between user-centric and data-centric models, and pick the suitable model for a given need.
• Can describe the most important implementation approaches of replicas and updating them.
• Is aware of of epidemic and quorum-based updating methods.

• Can describe the core features of different consistency models on a conceptual level.
• Can choose a consistency model that fits a specific purpose, and apply it in a meaningful way.
• Can describe both epidemic protocols and quorum-based replica management.

• Can design and implement a basic solution for replica management in a fixed network.
• Can design and implement replica management based on epidemic and quorum protocols.
• Is aware of recent literature in the field. 

• Can describe failure models, explaining their differences and uses and describe central implementation methods for fault tolerance.
• Can explain how an agreement can be formed between unreliable/faulty actors.
• Can describe how reliable multicast can be implemented in a dynamically changing group.

• Can explain the interdependencies and interplay of different failures and their handling mechanisms.
• Can justify the correct operation of the reliable multicast algorithm.
• Can justify how two-phase commit works in different failure situations
• Knows different ways to produce a checkpoint (for recovery) and can justify the correct operation of each method.

• Is aware of the general state of the art in literature on each of the mentioned points.
• Can apply probability calculus to estimate fault tolerance.