Laboratory Oriented Teaching In Web And Distributed Computing

In this paper, we present our experiences in teaching two laboratory-oriented courses in the Web and distributed computing area using our NSF-sponsored Distributed Systems Laboratory (DSL). The DSL consists of one Sun Enterprise 3500 server and 12 Sun Ultra 10 workstations connected through fast Ethernet and ATM networks. The computer systems in this laboratory are solely for the purpose of instruction in computer engineering and computer science, allowing system-level class projects to provide students hands-on experience. Science and Engineering of WWW (CECS 383) and Parallel and Distributed Processing (CECS 486) are two of the system area courses enhanced significantly by the laboratory. Science and Engineering of WWW introduces the fundamental technologies and their applications on the Internet and the Web. Students taking the course are given a sequence of projects to experiment with the technologies. They are asked to set up and configure their own Web servers, study performance and security-related issues, develop e-commerce applications supported by their Web servers. Parallel and Distributed Processing is a graduate-level course. It studies theoretical foundation and provides hands-on experience in the area of distributed and parallel computing. In addition to the theoretical studies, the students are offered a sequence of laboratory projects with the state-of-the-art technologies. These new laboratory-oriented courses have attracted many students and received good feedback. The projects in these courses are shown to be effective in helping students understand the concepts and theories of those subjects.