Postgraduate - UnitFIT5139 - Advanced distributed and parallel systems

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2014 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

print version

6 points, SCA Band 2, 0.125 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered, or view unit timetables.

Level	Postgraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Information Technology
Offered	Not offered in 2014

Synopsis

Modern computer systems contain parallelism in both hardware and software. This unit covers parallelism in both general purpose and application specific computer architectures and the programming paradigms that allow parallelism to be exploited in software. This unit examines both shared memory and message passing paradigms in both hardware and software; concurrency, multithreading and synchronicity; parallel, clustered and distributed supercomputing models and languages. Students will program in these paradigms. This unit draws on units in distributed databases and grid computing. It will also cover the technology and application of cloud computing with particular reference to programming frameworks (e.g. MapReduce, Hadoop etc).

Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit students should be able to:

solve basic problems in distributed computing, especially in relation to synchronisation, distributed transactions, concurrency control, distributed consensus;
explain the differences between various distributed computing models and widely used distributed computing schemes;
describe a variety of parallel programming paradigms, synchronisation and parallelisation primitives, message passing, data parallel, tuple space;
identify computational tasks that benefit from parallelism;
design and implement a parallel-distributed software system.

Assessment

Examination (3 hours): 60%, In-semester assessment: 40%

Chief examiner(s)

Dr Asad Khan

Workload requirements

Minimum total expected workload equals 12 hours per week comprising:

(a.) Contact hours for on-campus students:

Two hours of lectures
One 2-hour tutorial

(b.) Additional requirements (all students):

A minimum of 8 hours independent study per week for completing tutorial and project work, private study and revision.

Prerequisites

FIT5046