Anouncements

1. Room is changed to 4334 for the April 2nd and April 26th lectures (guest lecture)
   
2. Information of guest lectures is posted.
   
3. The lecture slides can be downloaded from here.

Synopsis

Middleware can be generally defined as software substrates facilitating the development and the deployment of distributed applications running in hetereogeneous and networked execution environments. This course focuses on reseach topics regarding various software engineering issues in developing and maintaining distributed systems and the underlying operating systems. These issues ocver programming models, languages, frameworks, and tools that help programmers to create and to deploy distributed systems that are low-cost, reliable, performant, and customizable.

Textbook

No official textbook. The following book is recommended as a reference:
Distributed Systems, Principles and Paradigms, 2nd Edition, Andrew Tanenbaum and Maarten Van Steen

Grading Policy

The student will be graded according to the activeness in participating discussions in class, the quality of presentions of the chosen research papers, and the progress made in accomplishing reading assignments and class projects. The grade will be assigned according to the following scheme:

• Class participation: 20%
• Paper presentation: 30%
• Course project: 50%

Class Presentation

Each week this class will cover a group of papers that focuses on a specific aspect of software engineering issues in building distributed systems. Students are expected to read all the papers in the group that will be presented (the number of presentations depends on the number of students in class).

More details about the paper reading. Please read very carefully.

Class Project

A major component of this course is devoted to a term-long project. The topic of the project is largely up to you, but to help you choose a project, a sample list of projects is provided below. This list should help students determine whether their own projects are of reasonable size and scope.

More details about the project format. Please read very carefully.

We will have the following guest lectures covering practical issues in using middleware to solve enterprise computing problems.

March 26th, Robert X. Qi (IBM China)
April 2nd, Willington Tang (Citibank, Hongkong)
April 21st, Victor Yang (MSCI Hongkong)