Release Dates

• Assignment 1: To be released no later than 22nd August.
• Assignment 2: To be released no later than 7th October.

The University's Academic Integrity 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 Integrity Policy.

Requirements to Pass this Unit

To pass this unit you must achieve a total mark equal to or greater than 50%.

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. Any late submission (e.g., from 12:55 am/00:55 onward) will incur a late submission penalty unless Special Consideration is granted.

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.

For example, if the assignment is worth 8 marks (of the entire unit) and your submission is late by 2 hours (or 23 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds), 0.4 marks (5% of 8 marks) will be deducted. If your submission is late by 24 hours (or 47 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds), 0.8 marks (10% of 8 marks) will be deducted, and so on.

Assessments where Late Submissions will be accepted 

In this unit, late submissions will be accepted as follows 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 (young.lee@mq.edu.au) and unit lecturer to let us know what is happening. This will make it easier for us to respond in a timely manner

Classes

Each week you should attend a 1.5-hour seminar and a two-hour in-person workshop. Lectures are provided as pre-recorded videos on a weekly basis, which you should watch on relevant topics in your own time before the seminar. Lecture recordings will be provided in iLearn. Lectures and seminars are a core learning experience where we will discuss the theoretical underpinnings and concepts that are essential to this unit. Seminars are an opportunity for you to engage and interact with a team of teaching staff including the lecturer. Key ideas for assessment tasks (the technical report and individual distributed systems development project in particular) will be discussed from time to time in seminars.

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 the session. 

Week 1 classes: Lectures, seminars and Workshops begin in Week 1.

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.

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.

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

Methods of Communication

We will communicate with you via your university email or through announcements on iLearn. Queries to the teaching staff members including the unit convenor can either be placed on the iLearn discussion board or sent to corresponding email addresses from your university email address.

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 cloud computing, edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT).