CS 677 Distributed Operating Systems

Spring 2007

Programming Assignment 2: Asterix and the Trading Post

Due: Tuesday, April 10 2007

(for off-campus students - 14 days after viewing Lecture 15)



  • A: The problem


  • B. Evaluation and Measurement

    1. Deploy at least 6 peers. They can be setup on the same machine (different directories) or different machines. .
    2. Do a simple experiment study to evaluate the behavior of your system. Compute the average response time per client search request by measuring the response time seen by a client for, say, 1000 sequential requests. Also, observe the performance change due to the coordinator re-election. Make necessary plots to support your conclusions.

  • C. What you will submit

  • When you have finished implementing the complete assignment as described above, you will submit your solution in the form of printouts.

  • Each program must work correctly and be documented. You should hand in:
    1. A copy of the output generated by running your program. When it receives a product, have your program print a message "bought product_name from peerID". When a peer issues a query, having your program print the returned results in a nicely formatted manner including the local time that the result is received. When a new coordinator is elected, print a message like " Dear buyers and sellers, My ID is ..., and I am the new coordinator".
    2. A seperate (typed) document of approximately two pages describing the overall program design, a description of "how it works", and design tradeoffs considered and made. Also describe possible improvements and extensions to your program (and sketch how they might be made).
    3. A program listing containing in-line documentation.
    4. A seperate description of the tests you ran on your program to convince yourself that it is indeed correct. Also describe any cases for which your program is known not to work correctly.
    5. Performance results.
    6. A readme file about how to run your code on EDLAB machines.
    7. After you turn in all the stuff mentioned above, please also send TA an email telling the location of your files.
  • Let us not waste a lot of trees. So, if any of the above turn out to be large, just save the relevant information in a file, leave it on your EDLAB account and submit the name of the file.

  • D. Grading policy for all programming assignments

    1. Program Listing
        works correctly ------------- 50%
        in-line documentation -------- 15%
    2. Design Document
        quality of design ------------ 15%
        understandability of doc ------- 10%
    3. Thoroughness of test cases ---------- 10%
    4. Grades for late programs will be lowered 12 points per day late.