Platforms for Teaching Distributed Computing Concepts to Undergraduate Students

Over the last two decades, information technology has been moving towards dis-tributed computing to host their applications and services. These systems can process more data more reliably than their central processing counterparts; however, dis-tributed applications are more complex to design and develop because they require additional properties like replication and fault tolerance to work effectively. These complexities translate to the educational setting, where schools need to invest in ad-ditional infrastructure, knowledge, and technologies to teach distributed concepts to students. This project presents the design and implementation of a complete educational framework for the teaching of distributed computing concepts at Cal Poly. The framework consists of three components: a Raspberry Pi cluster, a custom distributed file system (DecaFS), and a set of labs that can be used to support coursework in a distributed computing class. Each cluster is composed of five networked Raspberry Pi computers. The DecaFS distributed file system runs on the Raspberry Pi cluster. DecaFS provides the base functionality of a distributed file system with a design tha