CS5414 (Fall 2012) Programming Assignment Phase II
Bank-Balance Computation


Due: 11pm, 10/11/2012
Relative weight: 10 units

General Instructions. Work in a group comprising 1 to 3 students. All members of the group are responsible for understanding the entire assignment and submitted solution.

You may work in the team you used for Phase I or you may form a new team.

This assignment builds on work done in Phase I. Feel free to use any team's solution to Phase I as the basis for your solution to Phase II.

No late assignments will be accepted.

Academic Integrity. Collaboration between groups is prohibited and will be treated as a violation of the University's academic integrity code.

Background: Computing a Bank Balance

Once upon a time, banks opened at 9am and closed at 3pm. This left plenty of time each day for that day's transactions to be processed, and doing that processing was easy because the bank's accounts were not being changed by concurrent customer activity. A 21st Century bank will likely be open to its customers 24 hours a day. Networked computers should allow transactions to reach the bank's branches from anywhere in the world that is "wired". But, suitable protocols must be employed, so that customer transactions can run concurrently with the bank's back-office daily processing.

In this phase of the project, you will program a distributed snapshot algorithm that computes the assets of the distributed bank implemented for phase I. Doing the exercise should:

What to Build

Extend the branch GUI from Phase I with an additional "button" that allows a user to request an all-bank snapshot. Activating this button causes a message to be sent to the local branch server, which in turn should lead to taking a global snapshot of (i) all non-zero account balances at all branches and (ii) including any in-process Transfer operations. This global snapshot should be displayed in pieces, with a separate piece being displayed by the (local) branch GUI for each of the branches. Specifically, at each branch, that branch's GUI should display:

Note that, for this application, snapshot information is not being sent from branch to branch and is not being assembled at a single process.

Submission Procedure. All submissions should be made through CMS. CMS provides a way for you to define your group. Be advised that each group member must take an action in creating a group, and your group cannot submit anything through CMS until the group has been created.

Submit the following files (at least):

TEAM.txt which contains the names (and net-ids) for all team members. Also, for each team member give a 1 or 2 paragraph description of the tasks this team member performed and the number of hours this required.

README.txt which contains

topology_file.txt should specify an interesting interconnection topology for a multi-branch bank that will be used to illustrate the operation of your system.

TOPOexp.txt should specify what requirements the topology must satisfy in order for your snapshot algorithm to work correctly. For example, do you require that every link be bi-directional? Obviously, imposing fewer restrictions is better.

TestPlan.txt should describe the process and any tools (i.e. additional programs) you wrote in order to test your system.

SourceCode.zip A zip file containing the sources needed to compile and test your system.

Grading. Your grade will be based on the following elements: