Modern computer systems commonly rely on distributed and cloud computing systems, which enable seamless access to networked resources such as processors, data stores, sensor networks, cyber-physical systems, and multimedia services. In this unit, you will gain foundation knowledge, and an understanding of the system models and their enabling technologies. You will learn the core concepts of distributed computing, such as interprocess communication, concurrency and synchronisation, transactions and concurrency control as well as distributed databases and files. This unit also exposes you to distributed system characteristics of scalability, heterogeneity, security, and failure handling. The areas of mobile and ubiquitous computing and the social impact arising from the ubiquity of distributed systems will also be explored. You will learn to develop secure and reliable distributed computing applications and web services that can perform concurrent operations across multiple computers.

Every unit is reviewed for enhancement each year. At the most recent review, the following staff and student feedback items were identified and recommendations were made.

Feedback from Student Evaluations and Unit Coordinator Reflections

The volume of content was excessive and the code in the slides is difficult to understand.

Some advanced topics may be removed: causal consistency may no longer be covered, and sequential consistency can be taught conceptually rather than at the code level.

Feedback from Student Evaluations

The assessment specifications were unclear.

The final project may be broken down into stages and additional scaffolding provided to help students work through the project's intended ambiguity and conflicting requirements.