Distributed Systems in the Undergraduate Curriculum

Abstract

Much of the design and development for new computing systems in the 1990's is being done in a networked computing environment with distributed goals. So why do so many 4-year college computer science departments still not teach “Distributed computing systems” in their undergraduate curriculum? The reasons are varied, but one main one is the belief that such a course requires expensive hardware and the very latest software development tools. This article demonstrates how a course for undergraduates in distributed computing can be successful at giving the students the concepts and principles, while enabling them to create such an application to experience the distributed environment, and do it all on a limited budget. The principles are highlighted along with a practical design and development component, which can give seniors a way to tie together many of the principles and applications of previous courses. © 1994, ACM. All rights reserved.