Distributed Systems: Principles And Paradigms, 2nd Edition

Description

For courses on Distributed Systems, Distributed Operating Systems, and Advanced Operating Systems focusing on distributed systems, found in departments of Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering.

Very few textbooks today explore distributed systems in a manner appropriate for university students. In this unique text, esteemed authors Tanenbaum and van Steen provide full coverage of the field in a systematic way that can be readily used for teaching. No other text examines the underlying principles – and their applications to a wide variety of practical distributed systems – with this level of depth and clarity.

Features

• First part of the book dedicates one chapter to each of seven key principles of all distributed systems: communication, processes, naming, synchronization, consistency and replication, fault tolerance, and security.

– Gives students an understanding of the key principles, paradigms, and models on which all distributed systems are based.

• Second part of the book devoted to real-world distributed case studies:

– Includes examples of object-based, document-based, file-based, and coordination-based systems including Corba, DCOM, Globe, NFS v4, Coda, WWW, and Jini.

–    Because Part II is organized along the same seven key principles that are discussed in the first part, students not only learn how state-of-the-art real-world systems and middleware work, but are also able to compare the different systems easily.

• Numerous end-of-chapter exercises – Explain how the various principles of distributed systems work in practice.

• “Big picture” concepts and many technical details:

–    Presented in the clear, entertaining style unique to Tanenbaum and van Steen.

–    Helps students learn the foundation of distributed operating systems and how things work in the real world.

• Excellent coverage of timely, advanced distributed systems topics – Examines security, payment systems, recent Internet and Web protocols, scalability, and caching and replication.

Author

Andrew S. Tanenbaum has a B.S. Degree from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he heads the Computer Systems Group. He is also Dean of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, an interuniversity graduate school doing research on advanced parallel, distributed, and imaging systems. Nevertheless, he is trying very hard to avoid turning into a bureaucrat.

In the past, he has done research on compilers, operating systems, networking, and local-area distributed systems. His current research focuses primarily on the design of wide-area distributed systems that scale to a billion users. These research projects have led to five books and over 85 referred papers in journals and conference proceedings.

Prof. Tanenbaum has also produced a considerable volume of software. He was the principal architect of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit, a widely-used toolkit for writing portable compilers, as well as of MINIX, a small UNIX clone intended for use in student programming labs. Together with his Ph.D. students and programmers, he helped design the Amoeba distributed operating system, a high-performance microkernel-based distributed operating system. The MINIX and Amoeba systems are now available for free via the Internet.

Prof. Tanenbaum is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, winner of the 1994 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, and winner of the 1997 ACM/SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education. He is also listed in Who’s Who in the World.

Maarten van Steen  is a professor at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam where he teaches operating systems, computer networks, and distributed systems. He has also given various highly successful courses on computer systems related subjects to ICT professionals from industry and governmental organizations.

Prof. van Steen studied Applied Mathematics at Twente University and received a Ph.D. from Leiden University in Computer Science. After his graduate studies he went to work for an industrial research laboratory where he eventually became head of a group concentrating on programming support for parallel applications.

After five years of struggling to simultaneously do research and management, he decided to return to academia, first as an assistant professor in Computer Science at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and later as an assistant professor in Andrew Tanenbaum's group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

His current research concentrates on large-scale distributed systems. Part of his research focusses on Web-based systems, in particular adaptive distribution and replication in (collaborative) content distribution networks. Another subject of extensive research is fully decentralized (gossip based) peer-to-peer systems for wired as well as wireless ad hoc networks.