ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (12/12/89)
I've had a few questions concerning the use of ISIS in graduate courses, and just wanted to post my thoughts on this. First, I do this myself (and will be running such a course this spring), and have had good success with it. I usually run such a course from papers and make copies of the manual available to the students; an alternative would be to use a book like the one on Distributed Computing from Addison Wesley's ACM Press Series, which has two chapters on ISIS and covers a broad spectrum of topics. I tend to give two types of assignments: 1) Type 1: implement a "classical" protocol using ISIS as an environment but not focusing on ISIS properties per se. 2) Type 2: implement an ISIS service of some sort. Once ISIS V2.0 is out next spring, type 1 assignments should give performance pretty close to the "bare wire" numbers, which is attractive for performance evaluation too. Needless to say, the ISIS V1.3 picture is a bit different. It strikes me that all of us who are doing this sort of thing might benefit from sharing our experiences... I propose that we begin to post homework problems and how they went over and that we run a subtopic discussion on this. Everyone should benefit, and we'll save each other the trouble of making up a huge number of assignments. Ken