Home exercise 1

Topic: Prerequisites and introduction; organisation of learning

Individual work.


Write a "learning diary" about the Chapter 1 of the lectures. The basic
material can be found in the textbooks of Tanenbaum, van Steen and 
Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg; the lecture slides you can consider
as the list of contents. 
Length: about 2-4 pages (notice: essential is quality, not quantity).

Instructions for learning diary usage available in a separate file in
the same directory.

Essential issues (this time):
1. What were the essential contents of the treatment?
   Organize your text using the typical "abstract" organization 
   (environment, problem/goal, solution principles, evaluation).
   What was a novice student expected to learn?

2. What did you personally learn?
   What was new/surprising/interesting/useful/etc for you?

3a. What intrigueing questions arouse / remained unanswered?
    (For an itroductory piece, there should be plenty of these
    remaining. Make a list of things you intend to learn later!)

3b. Using the textbook, enhance the table 1-24 of Tanenbaum to
    cover more systems ranging from multiprocessor architectures
    to enterprise computing systems. For additional rows, 
    ask yourself for example the following questions:
    - in the system, is it fundamental to have a shared clock?
    - is a shared time essential? how accurate is should be?
    - is there a shared memory? where? how is it used?
    - how fast is the communication channel? how errorprone?
    - are all decisions local? distributed?
    Can you draw distinction between systems within the scope
    of the course and outside of the scope?