Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems

PDCS: the technology behind global information networks

As the Internet develops, it creates opportunities for business (e-commerce) and scientific applications (e-science using computational grids). And as computer equipment gets smaller and smaller, people are more likely to carry multiple computers around with them in the form of notebook computers, smart phones, wearable electronic devices, smart cards and RFID tags. Computers will become a standard feature of cars, roads, buildings, blackboards; the list is endless. These computers will communicate with each other and with fixed infrastructure, creating new applications and new problems, for example regarding privacy.

Developing new software architectures
The Master’s programme in Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems is a specialized programme to educate students in this new area. Entirely new software architectures will be required to develop large-scale, geographically distributed systems which allow billions of users to manipulate huge amounts of data. Scalability of algorithms will be key, and existing technologies will fall short in this respect. There is  a need for new techniques in security, performance analysis, programming models and visualization. All of these aspects are studied in depth in this Master’s programme.

Experimental computer science
Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems emphasizes experimental computer science rather than theory, and typically involves the design, implementation, testing and performance analysis of complex systems software. The curriculum includes many software lab courses, which are aimed at training you to carry out scientific software experiments to solve challenging research problems. For some projects, you will cooperate in small teams to train you in collaborative research.

Current research topics

Self-organizing large-scale distributed systems
One of the challenges of today is to develop large-scale distributed systems consisting of (hundreds of) thousands of nodes. To this end, fully decentralized solutions for systems management are a must. PDCS staff members are developing solutions to let very large networks of sensor nodes self-organize into hierarchies suitable for routing and data aggregation, even while the network continues to change. Similarly, solutions are sought and developed for automatically partitioning, distributing, and replicating data across the Web. As PDCS student, you can actively participate in this research.

Clouds: next-generation grid computers
Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular as a means to execute large, parallel programs on a collection of computers organized into a grid. Researchers in the Computer Systems group have teamed up in an international collaboration to build a system that will allow thousands of grid computers spread across the Internet to be shared by users all over the world. This system requires that we look into (network) security, scalability, operating systems, support for parallel programming, Internetwide search facilities, systems management, resource reservation, and much more. As PDCS student, you will be able to dive into the research that is needed to come up with workable solutions for these problems.

Research and publications

For more information on research projects, go to: http://www.cs.vu.nl/en/sec/cs/
For more information on Master projects go to: http://www.cs.vu.nl/en/research/computer-systems/term-projects/index.asp

Further information

Events and activities (Dutch) / Events (English) 
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