Weekly quizzes

Short online quizzes will be provided in iLearn relevant to the content of each of weeks 1-12. The quizzes are intended to help you assess your progress in learning and highlight areas that you need to study further. Each quiz will be available for one week. You may attempt a quiz multiple times. The quizzes contribute up to 10% of your final mark, based on a maximum value of 1% for each quiz. You can achieve full marks for the quizzes by earning a total of at least 10 marks in the quizzes. The sum of quiz marks will be capped at 10, i.e., the maximum marks will be 10 even if the actual total is over 10.

Hurdle assessment (Practical tasks)

Practical tasks are a hurdle assessment task (see assessment policy for more information on hurdle assessment tasks)

Late Assessment Submission Penalty 

From 1 July 2022, Students enrolled in Session based units with written assessments will have the following late penalty applied. Please see https://students.mq.edu.au/study/assessment-exams/assessments for more information. 

Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, a 5% penalty (of the total possible mark) will be applied each day a written assessment is not submitted, up until the 7^th day (including weekends). After the 7^th day, a grade of '0' will be awarded even if the assessment is submitted. Submission time for all written assessments is set at 11:55 pm. A 1-hour grace period is provided to students who experience a technical concern. 

For any late submission of time-sensitive tasks, such as scheduled tests/exams, performance assessments/presentations, and/or scheduled practical assessments/labs, students need to submit an application for Special Consideration.  

Assessments where Late Submissions will be accepted 

In this unit, late submissions will be accepted as follows: 

• Practical tasks – NO, unless Special Consideration is granted 
• Weekly quizzes – NO, unless Special Consideration is granted
• Technology Report – YES, Standard Late Penalty applies 
• Individual distributed systems development project – YES, Standard Late Penalty applies

Special Consideration

If you experience serious and unavoidable difficulties that affect your ability to meet the due dates for progress or 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. 

If you apply for special consideration, please note:

• Apply promptly. Late applications may make it impossible to sensibly offer an extension, and you may risk having to complete a different assessment task which would mean starting from scratch. For example, if you are ill for two days just before the due date, an extension of two days would be reasonable, but that extension cannot be granted more than two days after the due date since the extension end date would have already passed!

• Email the convenor and unit lecturer to let us know what is happening. This will make it easier for us to respond in a timely manner.

  • During weeks 1-6, email james.zheng@mq.edu.au and also the convenor young.lee@mq.edu.au

  • During weeks 7-13, email young.lee@mq.edu.au

Classes

Each week you should attend a two-hour lecture and a one-hour workshop. Lectures are a core learning experience where we will discuss the theoretical underpinnings and concepts that are essential to this unit. Key ideas for assessment tasks (technical report and individual distributed systems development project in particular) will be discussed from time to time in lectures. Lecture recordings will be provided on echo360.

Workshops provide an opportunity for you to ensure your understanding of the key concepts of the unit and develop skills to apply these concepts to practical distributed systems. Workshops combine tutorial-style discussion with practical programming experience, particularly in the later weeks of session. Each week you should start to prepare your solutions to questions for an online quiz.

iLearn Web Site

All learning materials will be published on iLearn including lecture slides and assessment details.

You are required to check the iLearn website at least once a week to ensure that you are aware of the latest materials available there.

Unit Forum

A forum for unit discussions is provided on iLearn. Students are free to post questions, comments or hints in relation to any aspect of the unit, except that you should avoid posting any questions, hints, comments or solutions that could be interpreted as cheating.

Textbook*

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.

* A soft copy of each of these three books is freely available online through publisher's websites.

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

Week 1-6: Key distributed concepts, such as System models, Architectures, Communications, Synchronisation and Fault tolerance.

Weeks 7-12: Applied distributed computing models and emerging distributed systems, such as virtualisation, cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT).