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Metropolitan State University (Home)

ICS 432 Distributed and Cloud Computing

Covers the fundamental concepts of distributed computer systems and its major branch of cloud computing in which computing is delivered as a service over a network whereby resources are rented rather than owned by the end user. Topics include distributed operating and file systems, cloud-enabling technologies, virtualization, cloud service models, cloud platform architecture, and cloud services including compute, storage, networking, and big data services. Students will gain hands-on experience by implementing projects utilizing public cloud infrastructures like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google App Engine, or Microsoft Azure.

Prerequisites

Special information

First day attendance is mandatory.
Note: Students are responsible to both be aware of and abide by prerequisites for ICS courses for which they enroll, and will be administratively dropped from a course if they have not met prerequisites.
4 Undergraduate credits

Effective May 3, 2017 to present

Learning outcomes

General

  • Explain the fundamental concepts of distributed computing including distributed operating systems, distributed file systems, and design principles of computer clusters.
  • Identify and compare virtualization structures and tools, CPU, memory, and I/O virtualization techniques
  • Explain and give examples of the motivations behind cloud computing, the evolution of the paradigm, its applicability, benefits, as well as current and future challenges.
  • Define and illustrate the basic principles in data center design; cloud management techniques and cloud software deployment considerations.
  • Experiment and differentiate cloud storage technologies and relevant distributed file systems, NoSQL databases and object Storage.
  • Use and contrast different cloud programming models including MapReduce and Spark
  • Experiment and compare the programming support of major cloud service providers including Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure.