CSE533: Fall 2001: Announcements
Scott Stoller

31 Dec

Scores: Here are Everyone's Scores on All Assignments. This enables you to check that we accurately recorded your scores. The table is sorted by score on the midterm. You know all of your own scores (or you will after you pick up your remaining assignments from my office), so you can easily recognize your line in the table.

27 Dec

Grades: I added grading statistics for all remaining items. proj2 scores and course grades have been sent by email. You may pick up your hw4, hw5, and final exam from my office at your convenience. If you have questions about the grading of these last items, it's not too late to ask; course grades will be changed if appropriate. As I mentioned in class, I welcome your feedback about the course.

21 Dec

Exam: Final Exam Solution is available.

17 Dec

Exam: As mentioned earlier, the final exam may cover all of the course material (with the two small exceptions noted in class about 2 weeks ago), but most (possibly all) of it will be about material not covered by the midterm. One more comment: there will be no questions about synchronization of real-time clocks.

Office hour: I will have an office hour on Thu, 20 Dec, at 3:30pm, in case people have questions while preparing for the final exam.

Homework: Homework 5 Solution is available.

12 Dec

Homework: Homework 4 Solution is available.

11 Dec

Office hour: I will have an office hour on Wed, 12 Dec, at 3pm.

Devhood: This is a general announcement, not particularly related to the course. People interested in software development on Microsoft platforms might want to look at DevHood.

10 Dec

Final Exam: The final exam will be on Friday, 21 December, 11am-1:30pm, in our usual classroom (Harriman Hall 108).

4 Dec

Homework: Homework 5 is available.

Extra Credit: The extra credit mentioned in the earliest announcement on the project page can be submitted, at the latest, together with proj2.

3 Dec

Final Exam: It is important to bring to the final exam: the textbook [CDK] and the handouts on leader election [Chow and Johnson] and Timewheel [Fetzer, Mishra, and Cristian].

3 Dec

Demo: No one objected to concurrent demos, so we will try it. Each team should sign up ASAP for a 45-minute timeslot during one of these intervals: To sign up, send email to Fanglu, stating your first-choice and second-choice timeslots, and indicating where you plan to hold the demo (e.g., depending on whether you want to use a Sun or PC). Most demos can probably be held in the T.A. office room (Room 1207, Sun workstation) or the Grad NT Lab (Room 1239, PCs).

Schedule: As announced by email, there is no lecture today. Use the time to do hw4.

Homework: Homework 4 is available.

Handout: I finally found an on-line version of the pre-Thanksgiving handout about Timewheel. I made a link to it in the bibliographic entry below.

26 Nov

Handout: The pre-Thanksgiving handout is:
Christof Fetzer, Shivakant Mishra, and Flaviu Cristian. The Timewheel Asynchronous Group Communication Protocol. U.C. San Diego, Computer Science and Engineering Department, Tech Report CSE95-411, 1995.
The following two papers are subsets of it:
S. Mishra, C. Fetzer and F. Cristian, The Timewheel Asynchronous Atomic Broadcast Protocol. Proceedings of the 1997 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications, Las Vegas, NV (June 1997), 1239--1248.

S. Mishra, C. Fetzer, and F. Cristian, The Timewheel Group Membership Protocol. Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Workshop on Fault-tolerant Parallel and Distributed Systems, Orlando, FL (April 1998).

Erratum: In today's lecture, I attempted to correct the definition of weak atomicity by adding the disjunct (forall q in g' : q dlvr u in g). I should have added the disjunct (forall q in (g' intersect g) : q dlvr u in g).

Homework: Homework 3 Solution is available. I added grading statistics for hw3.

15 Nov

Homework: I added grading statistics for hw2.

10 Nov

Homework: In problem 1, I had in mind concurrent RMIs by the same client on the same object. In problem 2, there are multiple ways that a process can obtain reomte references. It is conceivable that the answer depends on how the remote references are obtained (e.g., directly from registry, or in the arguments or return value of an RMI). For any possible combinations (of ways of obtaining the two references to stub objects that you compare with ==) that you don't explicitly try in your design and experiments, you should argue that, for any reasonable implementation of RMI, the answer would be the same as for one of the combinations that you did try.

8 Nov

Exam1: I revised my solution to problem 1. It now contains a more detailed description of the simple and inefficient protocol.

6 Nov

Homework: Homework 3 is available.

Exam1: I added a histogram of the scores (see Statistics, above). This also answers questions about the maximum score.

Exam1: To confirm my answer to 7b (namely, that revalidation of files after a client reboot is done on-demand), see: J. H. Howard et al., Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Feb. 1988, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 51-81. It says (p. 59): "When a workstation is rebooted, Venus considers all cached files and directories suspect and generates a cache validation request for the first use of each such entry."

5 Nov

Exam1: I added grading statistics about exam1 (see above). I will return the graded exams during today's class.

2 Nov

Exam: Exam 1 Solution is available.

1 Nov

Office hour: My office hour on Nov 2 is moved to: Nov 1, 2pm-2:30pm, and Nov 2, 8:40am-9:40am.

31 Oct

Homework: Homework 2 Solution is available.

24 Oct

Office Hours: I will present the Ongoing Research Seminar on 26 Oct. My office hour that day is rescheduled to 9am-10am.

JBuilder: JBuilder5 Personal Edition CDs are available! Stop by my office if you want one. Apparently the CD contains versions for Windows, Linux, and Solaris.

21 Oct

Exam: The midterm exam covers material up to and including Clock Synchronization. The midterm exam will not contain questions related to the project; the final exam will.

Homework: Homework 2 is available.

18 Oct

Demo: See additional info about demos on the project page.

15 Oct

Reading: Read [CDK, chapter 10]. This course does not cover [CDK, chapter 9].

12 Oct

Midterm: Reminder: the midterm will be on 2 November 2001.

5 Oct

JBuilder: JBuilder5 CDs should be available in about a week.

21 Sep

Project: I added some details under How to Submit an Assignment. Also, remember (from the project handout) that grading reflects readability of the code (modular design, indentation, meaningful variable names, etc.) and the quality of the documentation (comments in code, design.txt, instructions.txt).

21 Sep

Project: I added some important comments to the Project Page.

Hw1: I added grading statistics about hw1. You can get your graded hw1 from Fanglu during his office hours next week; or, you can get it in class the following week. Unusually clear code and documentation earned extra credit.

Handout: There was a handout on Sun NFS in class today. If you didn't receive it, please ask me or a classmate for a copy.

17 Sep

Reading: Read [CDK, chapter 8].

Reading: Read [CDK, chapters 4-5]. You should be familiar with Operating Sytems [CDK, chapter 6], but we won't discuss it in class. This class does not directly cover security, because cse508 does. If you haven't taken cse508, you might benefit from reading [CDK, chapter 7], since the project involves indirect use of digital signatures.

Midterm: Unless I receive strenuous objections in the next few days, the midterm will be on 2 November 2001.

10 Sep

Academic Integrity: I expanded the section on Academic Integrity.

6 Sep

Computers and Accounts: I added a section on Computers and Accounts.

Newsgroup: If you have trouble reading the newsgroup, see the new comments above about setting your newsgroups server.

5 Sep

Hw1: Simply killing server processes is probably not an effective way to test that both of the time-outs in your client code work correctly. For some testcases, you may want to modify the client code, the server code, or both. Explain such modifications in test.txt.

Teams: I plan to form teams tonight for students who did not form teams by themselves. If you have a last-minute team to announce, please send me the information today.

Project: For convenient future reference, project announcements will be added to the Project Page (there is a link to it in the Table of Contents of this page).

4 Sep

Accounts: If you are not a CS graduate student and do not have an account on the CS Dept Sun workstations, please send me a message, and I will get an account for you. (CS graduate students should already have accounts.)

JBuilder5: The department expects the JBuilder5 CDs to be available in about 2 weeks, pending Borland's final approval of our request.

3 Sep

Newsgroup: I added information about the Course Newsgroup.

31 Aug

Hw1: test.txt needs to contain only testcases with 1 client; this is just to keep test.txt small (it can grow rapidly, if you use lots of println's and include the output of your program in the file). However, we will look at your code to see whether it would work with multiple clients; if we have any doubts, we will run it with multiple clients ourselves, or ask you to do so for us.

28 Aug

Office Hours: I added info about office hours (near top of page).

27 Aug

Questionnaire: If you didn't fill out this questionnaire in class today, please fill it out now. You can edit it and email it to me, or print it and put it under my office door or give it to me in class on Friday. Remember: KLOC = thousand line of code.

Policies: I just updated the section on Academic Integrity.

Project: I just updated the "Teams" section of the Project Description. The new version says "(ver 27 Aug, 17:35)" near the top.

Office Hours: I added information about my office hours.

Project: I just added Project Grading Policies to this page and a fifth item to the "What to Submit" section of the Project Description.

Reading: Read [CDK, chapters 1-3]. ("CDK" denotes the course textbook.)

Homework: Homework1 is now available.

Scott Stoller
Last modified: Fri Mar 11 08:47:17 EST 2005