Distributed Systems Through Middleware

Technical Issues, Current Status and Challenges

 

Term Paper, COP 5611, Operating Systems, Spring 2003

Department of Computer Science, Florida State University

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Points: 100

Due: Week 16, Tuesday, April 22, 2003

 

In this class, a distributed system is defined as a collection of independent computers that appears to its users as a single coherent system. Given that most existing computing environments consist of heterogeneous computers, there are challenging technical issues to design and implement a truly distributed system. Among the current paradigms, it seems clear that most promising approach toward a truly distributed system is to build such a system through middleware.

In this term paper, you will survey and analyze the current status of middleware-based distributed systems, and technical issues and challenges of building such systems. As this is a very board topic, your paper needs to focus on the following points.

-         The goals and requirements of a truly distributed systems

-         The fundamental issues in developing truly distributed systems

-         The middleware approach for distributed systems

-         A case study of existing middleware systems, emphasizing how a truly distributed system can built based on the middleware components

-         Challenges and future research/development issues and potential solutions

The paper should be at least six pages (but no more than ten pages) with double space and 12 font size.

 

Submission

Hardcopy is required for submission.

 

Grading:

 

Additional Information

The book (“Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms”) by Tanenbaum and van Steen provides  a good introduction to the issues in distributed systems and how middleware approach provides a potential solution. It also offers a fairly detailed discussion on CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and Microsoft’s Dcom (Distributed Component Object Model). You can also search the web to find papers on this topic. Keep in mind that you need to reference properly the sources of concepts and ideas; otherwise, you may be subject to plagiarism, a serious academic matter.