UsingActorsinanInteractiveAnimationinaGraduateCourse.pptVIP

Using Actors in an Interactive Animation in a Graduate Course on Distributed Systems A play (experiment) in four acts by Philippas Tsigas and Boris Koldehofe Content Background, intention and motivation Self-Stabilisation Experiment: Act one, ..., Act four Evaluation Conclusion Background Every year about seven one week intensive courses for graduate students are offered Courses give an overview on the research of the department Help new Ph.D students to decide on their research direction This particular course deals with research areas in distributed systems in particular self-stabilisation and fault tolerance Addresses students without background in distributed systems Intention and Motivation Students should understand the basic concepts They should be able to verify the correctness and proof basic properties Become interested in the research topics discussed in the course Method and Related Work Propose a dramatisation to teach Dijkstra′s self-stabilising token passing algorithm Based on the idea that animations can be useful for introducing basic concepts in distributed computing Related Work LYDIAN (1999) or ViSiDiA Dramatisation (Rifkin, 1994 and Ben-Ari, Kolikant,1999) qualitative and quantitative approaches (Kolikant, Ben-Ari, Pollack, 2000). Self-stabilisation The distributed system works correct if it is in a safe state Ensures that the system behaviour eventually stabilises to a safe subset of states regardless of the initial state Dramatisation of Dijkstra′s self-stabilising token passing algorithm Uses four acts, each associated with an educational topic Each act is followed by a discussion with the audience (the students) The processes are represented by a real actor. The states of processes (active/sleeping) are indicated by an actors speaking/ not speaking. The shared memory is represented by a partitioned table The value of a shared variable is represented by the number of apples inside the respective partition of the table The perfect system