The University's academic honesty policy will be enforced. You may assist your fellow students with general concepts, pointers to resources and useful tools or commands that are publicly available. You may not become involved in any way in helping a fellow student to find the solution to their particular task, nor may you share with them any aspect of the solution of your particular task. If you decide to develop or modify a tool (including software tools, procedures or methods) to assist you in solving your programming task, you may not provide that tool to your fellow students, nor may you publish it.

Each assessment task must be the sole work of the student turning it in. Any cheating will be handled under the University's Academic Honesty Policy.

Late submissions

Late submissions will be accepted but will incur a penalty unless there is an approved Special Consideration request. A 12-hour grace period will be given after which the following deductions will be applied to the awarded assessment mark: 12 to 24 hours late = 10% deduction; for each day thereafter, an additional 10% per day or part thereof will be applied until five days beyond the due date. After this time, a mark of zero (0) will be given. For example, an assessment worth 20% is due 5 pm on 1 January. Student A submits the assessment at 1 pm, 3 January. The assessment received a mark of 15/20. A 20% deduction is then applied to the mark of 15, resulting in the loss of three (3) marks. Student A is then awarded a final mark of 12/20.

Note that late submissions will not be accepted for online quizzes, in-class activities and exam.

Special Consideration

If you experience serious and unavoidable difficulties that affect your ability to meet the due dates for the closing date of an assessment task, you may apply for special consideration as explained at https://students.mq.edu.au/study/my-study-program/special-consideration. If the request is accepted, the action may be to grant an extension of the relevant due date(s), or it may be to require you to submit an alternative assessment item. 

Textbooks

1. “Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms” by Maarten van Steen and Andrew Tanenbaum, 3rd (3.01) edition. 2. “Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design” by George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, and Tim Kindberg, Addison Wesley, 5th edition. 3. “Distributed and Cloud Computing: From Parallel Processing to the Internet of Things” by Geoffrey C. Fox, Jack Dongarra, and Kai Hwang, 1st edition.

The soft copy of the first two books is “freely” available online.

iLearn Unit Home Page

COMP3100 will make extensive use of the iLearn course management system, including for the delivery of class materials, discussion boards, submission of work and access to marks and feedback. Students should check the iLearn site (https://ilearn.mq.edu.au) regularly for unit updates.

Questions and general queries regarding the content of this unit, its lectures or practical classes, or its assessments should be posted to the discussion boards on the COMP3100 iLearn site. In particular, any questions which are of interest to all students in this unit should be posted to one of these discussion boards, so that everyone can benefit from the answers. Questions of a private nature should be directed to the unit teaching staff.

Lectures

Lectures are a core learning experience where we will discuss the theoretical underpinnings and concepts that are essential to this unit. Attendance at lectures is highly recommended. Lecture recordings will be available in echo360 accessible from the unit iLearn site.

Workshops (Practicals)

Practical classes commence in Week 1. Each week has two hours of practical class. Each week you should actively participate in practical class and complete tasks associated with the class. You should attend your enrolled practical class. The practical assessment item is a hurdle in this unit. You must achieve at least 8 marks out of 20, and a total of at least 50 overall marks, in order to pass the unit.

The detailed unit schedule will be available on iLearn. The unit is organised into two 6-week periods, with topics broadly as follows.

Weeks 1-6: Foundations of distributed systems, such as system models, communications, synchronisation and fault tolerance.

Weeks 7-12: Real-world and emerging distributed systems, such as cloud data centres, Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing.

Both assignments are set as individual work. Code plagiarism check tools are used.