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.

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.

Requirements to Pass this Unit

To pass this unit you must:

• Attempt all assessments, and
• Achieve a total mark equal to or greater than 50%, and
• Participate in weekly practicals, and achieve a minimum of 4 of the 10 marks

Hurdle assessment (Practical tasks)

This unit has weekly practical classes and you must demonstrate your progress in developing and communicating knowledge and skills and achieve a minimum of 4 marks of the 10 marks allocated, i.e., 40%. Failure to meet this requirement may result in a fail grade for the unit. In the case of missing your designated practical class or failing to show your progress, another opportunity might be given if a Special Consideration is approved (see below).

Late Assessment Submission Penalty 

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
• Major assignments – 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 commening in week 1. 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 small group teaching activity-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.

Methods of Communication

We will communicate with you via your university email and through announcements on iLearn. Queries to convenors can either be placed on the iLearn discussion board or sent to the unit convenor via the contact email on iLearn. In particular, for any adminstrative matters, you should contact the unit convenor (young.lee@mq.edu.au). For matters regarding lectures and workshops, you should the corresponding teaching staff member. You may expect emails from the teaching team of the unit.

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.

COVID Information

For the latest information on the University’s response to COVID-19, please refer to the Coronavirus infection page on the Macquarie website: https://www.mq.edu.au/about/coronavirus-faqs. Remember to check this page regularly in case the information and requirements change during semester. If there are any changes to this unit in relation to COVID, these will be communicated via iLearn.  

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 systems 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).