Exercises on Distributed Lists

Our Python 3 program simulates a chain (a case of a line network) of asynchronous Processing Elements (PEs), each communicating only with its neighbors. The chain can store a list of integers, one integer per PE. This provides an environment for 40 exercises on design and implementation of distributed algorithms for list operations, from deque operations to sorting, and on evaluating their complexity. To aid students in the complexity analysis we introduce visualizations called Dominos and Activity Diagrams. The algorithms require a different design and may have complexity different from their counterparts on arrays or linked lists. They can be run on an any computer with the standard installation of Python 3.

Additional details are available in documents in this repository:

• distrListPoster.pdf
• distrLIstSlides.pdf
• distrListPaper.pdf