Study Guide for CS451 Final Exam

• The final exam in CS451 will be closed books and closed notes. It will take place on Friday May 11 from 2pm – 5pm, in our normal meeting room (Thornton Hall D223).
• The final will be approximately 2/3 post-midterm and 1/3 pre-midterm. That is, about 1/3 of the material on the exam will be drawn from the material we discussed prior to the midterm on Mar 20, and about 2/3 of the material on the exam will be based on class material from Mar 20 through the end of class on Tuesday, May 1.
• The instructions for the final exam in CS451 are very similar to the instructions for the CS451 midterm exam. To see hints on how to prepare for the material prior to the midterm, see http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~humphrey/cs451/Assignments/MidtermPrep.html . To prepare for the material after the midterm, you should study the following material:

1. The PDFs of the class notes (which can be found at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~humphrey/cs451).

2. The following Google papers:

1. “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”

2. “The Google File System”

3. “MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters” (just the overview of this)

3. The following material textbook (Distributed System: Concepts and Design, 4^th edition):

1. Chapter 19 (“Web Services”) except Section 19.6, 19.7

2. Chapter 10 (“Peer-to-Peer Systems”) except Section 10.6

3. Chapter 11 (“Time and Global States”) except Section 11.6

4. Chapter 12 (“Coordination and Agreement”)

5. Chapter 13 (“Transactions and Concurrency Control”) only Section 13.1 and Section 13.2

6. Chapter 15 (“Replication”) only Section 15.1, Section 15.2, and Section 15.3

4. Assignments #3, #4, and #5

• As with the midterm, as a general rule, the importance of a particular topic can be determined by the amount of time we spent in class discussing it.
• As with the midterm, the format of the exam will be:

1. A small number of short answer (at most a three-sentence answer)

2. A small number of longer answer (similar in spirit to the homework questions. NOTE: I might ask you to write some code and/or analyze some code)