Created as part of the Master of information Technology and Master of Applied Information Technology Units - 2009

On advice from the Director Education Quality and approved by the Chief Examiner and GPC Chair, amended the Assessment field from Assignments 100% to In-semester 100%. The Unit Guide has Assignments 75% and Class Test 25% hence technically Assignments: 100% is incorrect.Amendment for S2,2012 implementation.

15/7/2013 - On advice from the ADE and GPC Chair, the unit is now required to have 2 hour labs per week in addition to the 2 hour lecture.

20/03/2015 - Objectives updated to Learning Outcomes for AQF compliance. Effective Sem 2, 2015.

22/6/2015 - Update the Learning Outcomes.

07/12/2017 - Unit disestablished at FEC 5/17 Item 7.3.

This is a core unit in the Software Engineering Specialisation. It is one of four core units in the Software Engineering Specialisation in the MIT and MAIT and an elective in all FIT masters.

Distributed systems are in common use today and the adoption of parallel and grid-based systems is increasing. This unit gives a firm grounding in the types of hardware, the paradigms for programming, the tools and the algorithms used to support such systems. Thus an understanding of the power and limitations of these systems is gained with experience in how to program them.

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

• explain the principles and techniques behind the design of parallel systems.
• describe and distinguish variety of parallel architectures, such as bus-based, massively parallel, cluster, vector; knowledge of a variety of parallel programming paradigms, synchronization and parallelization primitives, message passing, data parallel, and tuple space.
• design, develop and debug parallel programs using a variety of paradigms, such as locking, concurrency, synchronicity, parallelism, scheduling, and communication across networks.
• explain fundamentals of model connection-oriented and connectionless communication in a Client Server architecture.
• analyze failure types in a Distributed System for achieving fault tolerance and error recovery within such system.
• Write a report on new trends in of multi-process algorithms by Investigating and analysis of research papers about distributed systems. And communicate their knowledge orally and in written report, so they can express own reflections and attitudes in the area of research.
• Work independently and analyze a problem and form a plan on how to work towards a solution using distributed programming models to achieve process distribution and communication.
• collect and analyze various types of information, and develop practical skills in creating parallel distributed applications.
• cooperate effectively within small groups and work in practical design, implement, and debug in simulated distributed systems.
• construct theoretical models and implement them in a virtualized computing environment; and present all their work in practical demonstrations.

020103

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.

In-semester: 100%

Minimum total expected workload equals 12 hours per week comprising:

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

(b.) Additional requirements (all students):

FIT

For MAIT students, FIT9017, FIT9018, FIT9019, FIT9030, FIT9020 and FIT4037.

Operating systems, including synchronization and interprocess communication mechanisms Advanced computer architecture, including pipelining techniques