University Syllabus WBUT

I have been teaching Advance OS and Distributed computing for sometime. They have similar content. They talk about distributed computing. Advanced features such as a higher level OS that can co-ordinate the OS of individual yet disparate systems are the topics of discussion. What I cannot help wondering is how many such systems are being built? The computers on networks are able to communicate as peer to any other peer and get the work done without trying to synchronize events in geographically dispersed locations. How many of the computer science engineers we are producing are going to use the techniques being taught!

On the other hand we have virtualization that really manages multiple and different operating systems withing one physical box. Cloud computing is a super hot topic that handles thousands of boxes in a data center. Should not we talk about these topics! Granted the synchronization and communication techniques are going to be useful. But giving the students a touch of reality is important too!