Welcome students to the fall semester. You will find all of this information on the WebCT course. If you do not have your new career account login get to CTIS and get it quick. 
This class looks at several aspects of high performance systems and distributed systems.
The text book for this class:
Taenbaum, Andrew & Van Steen, Maarten “Distributed Systems Principles and Paradigms, Second Edition”, 2007, ISBN 0132392275
For this class you are going to have a semester project and presentation on that project. The class is primarily lecture and hybrid so half of your work is distance learning/virtual. The semester project though will be a thread throughout the semester and we will define that project in the first week . There are threaded discussions. There is a personal semester paper and a pre-paper process. There are three exams including a comprehensive final exam. The first two exams are open note, open book, and take at home. We will do a review on those weeks in the class session after covering that weeks chapter.
We have some neat resources available for this class. There is a 20+ node cluster available and one of your tasks as a student will be to architect the new access system and build the cluster to run parallelized programs. There are several really neat options for doing this. We can build a Linux Beowulf cluster. We can build a Windows Cluster. One options is to build the machines as dual boot so we can do either at a drop.
After this is built the architecture should allow the student to access from anywhere and set up experiments on the fly remotely. The next best thing would be to create an environment where you can spawn many virtual machines and test environments and configurations that way.
Another application of the cluster would be to do the rendering of the video for the CGT students.
Imagination is a good thing.
The class should be interesting and fun. Come to class on day one prepared to discuss chapter 1. If you have any questions post them in the comments here or send me an email through WebCT. If you are not registered on the blog use first initial – last name as a login ID.
