Advanced topics in dependable and secure distributed systems (Leonardo Querzoni - 3 Credits - I Semester)
Modern computing architectures, characterized by complex structures, large scale and dynamic behaviours, continuously face the security hurdles posed by unreliable infrastructures, malicious hackers, industrial espionage or even modern cyber weapons. Well known best practices in security, even if still needed, somewhat struggle to face this new generation of threats and must be thus strengthened and combined with novel approaches. Starting from well known techniques for security (public/secret key cryptography, digital signatures, standard authentication protocols, intrusion detection tools) this course aims at analyzing current threats and studying a set of advanced tools and techniques for enforcing dependability and security aspects in modern distributed systems.
The course will focus on the following topics:
- Resilience to byzantine faults (including Byzantine consensus and Byzantine-resilient state machine replication)
- Security in complex distributed systems (including distributed attacks to complex IT infrastructures, SCADA security, distributed port scan detection)
- Introduction to digital forensics and legal issues (including digital forensic evidence treatment and technological aspects implied by the italian CAD (Codice dell'amministrazione digitale)).

Data center planning and management (Prof. B. Ciciani, Ing. D. Liberini, Ing: C. Gandolgo - 3 Credits - II Semester))

The planning and the management of a data center is a complex and interdisciplinary process whose main steps include: the identification of the IT services to support, their characteristics and policy of pricing, the analysis of the cost, the identification of the SLA to guarantee, the available technologies, the financial constraints, the measure and report of the QoS, the capacity planning, the capacity management, the service continuity, the incident management , the problem management, the configuration management and the release management. In this course, after a preview of the main steps of the project and management process of a data center, ITIL, one of the most used framework in this context, will be presented. Afterward two of the main steps of the process will be presented in deep: the capacity management and the service continuity management.
 

Analysis and Design of Complex Distributed Systems (Prof. R. Beraldi, Dr. A. Virgillito - 3 Credits - II Semester) 

This course will focus on the analysis, design and technological aspects of distributed systems. In the first part of the course a short introduction to the general concepts behind the design of complex distributed system will be given. The second part of the course will be devoted to the presentation of several examples of real or realistic projects, spanning, for example, from web-based enterprise systems, to real-time applications and mobile platforms. The main characterizing issues of a project will be highlighted, discussing how the various technological and organizational constraints lead to the final technical choices.

Concurrent and parallel programming (Prof. B. Ciciani - 3 Credits - II Semester)
The goal of this course is to explain to the students how to design, develop and evaluate the performance of distributed and parallel programs. For this purpose, the course will first introduce high performance architectures, and will afterwards focus on methodologies for the development of parallel and distributed programs. Afterwards, MPI and PDES frameworks will be used to show how to develop parallel applications. At the end of the course the transactional programming will be introduced and it will be used to manage the concurrency in high performance platforms (centralized and distributed).