CSCE 455/855 Distributed Operating Systems

Group Projects

The projects in this class are intended to address a number of goals. The primary goal is that they should address a non-trivial aspect of distributed systems, and as such are probably best approached by a group. The preference for a group is a realization that the scope of a meaningful distributed system project is probably unrealistic for a single person within the context of a semester class project.

A secondary goal of the semester project is to provide an opportunity to the student to investigate a topic to which they might not otherwise be able to devote time and effort. Speculative or fanciful projects often develop into some of the most interesting research projects by discovering or revealing unsuspected potential or relationships among distributed system issues; that's why they call it research.

This year's projects will be based on the undergraduate thesis written by Matt Evans in May 2000 entitled, "FTFS: The Design of a Fault Tolerant Distributed File-System "(pdf copy). The project will be done in teams of four, with each team doing an application space implementation of the base FTFS described in Matt's thesis. In many ways the projects is an extension of the programs you developed for PA1 and PA2--only now you will do block-level replication instead of file level replication and you must assume faults will occur.

Those teams consisting of CSCE 855 students must also choose at least aspect of FTFS, as defined by Evans, and implement an advanced algorithm for that feature rather than the simple (naive) approach Evans suggests.

The project consists of three team assignments (in addition to the individual PA1 and PA2 assignments). First, by 12:30pm April 2, 2001, your team must sumbit a project proposal that follows the format covered in class. I suggest using my templates. Second, you must implement and demonstrate to me your FTFS by 3pm Friday, May 4, 2001. You should submit your source code and via the handin program (it will be number 3). Be sure that your source code includes in-line comments that help me to understand your code. Third, you must submit a final report that covers your design, implementation and evaluation by 3pm Friday, May 4, 20001. If you did your proposal well, your Introduction and Related Work sections will be largely unchanged from the propsoal to the final report. The final report is a full technical report that serves as your design and testing document.

If you have any questions, please contact me!