To provide students with a basic understanding of theory and practice in the construction of distributed systems.

• Understand how the architecture of a distributed system influences the characteristics of the system;
• describe important properties of distributed systems and relevant architectural considerations of such systems;
• describe essential properties and relevant applications of standard protocols used in distributed systems;
• Characterize different classes of distributed systems
• Characterize different implementation paradigms for distributed systems;
• Select a suitable distributed algorithm for a distributed system, which meets given design requirements;
• Select a suitable implementation paradigm for a distributed system, which meets given design requirements;
• develop a high level design of a distributed system based on the selected algorithm and implementation paradigms;
• Develop a partial implementation of a distributed system based on an informal desciption of its function and goals.

Fundamental properties of distributed systems, such as parallelism, communication and distribution of application state and control.
Basic architectures for distributed systems, such as centralized architectures, fully distributed architectures and hybrid architectures. Design of distributed systems. Service oriented architectures (SOA).
Programming paradigms for the development of distributed systems, such as client-server, peer-to-peer (P2P), web-services, clusters, cloud and Grid computing.