COMP90020 - Distributed algorithms

Team

• Name: Roko's Basilisk
• Members:
  • Sebastian Bobadilla - 1305851
  • Suhrid Gupta - 1313675

Topic

Mutual Exclusion

Description of the app

For the application of the mutex we chose to implement a peer-to-peer file sharing app. In this app all clients connect initially to an index server that keeps track of the files and the clients that shared them. Then, after querying the server for a file and getting the list of clients and their addresses, the file is transmitted in blocks through TCP connections.

Code Structure

The code contains two main folders:

• The client folder contains all the code relating to the peer-to-peer client including the frontend and backend implementation.
  • Inside the 'client/frontend/' folder, we have implemented the frontend using JavaScript, ReactJS, and ChakraUI library.
  • Inside the 'client/backend' folder we have several handlers detailing the handling of file transfer. One of the important handlers is present in 'handlers/mutex', and that is the hemlock.py program. This details the implementation of the mutex we are using in our file transfer application.
• The server folder contains the code relating to the index server of the peer-to-peer system which stores all information relating to the clients and what files they share, along with details of the files including size, number of file blocks, and checksum.

Algorithm implemented

The algorithm that we implemented for ensuring the file is not corrupted is a mutex algorithm described in Hemlock.

Installation of dependencies

Frontend

All React dependencies are managed through pnpm package manager. For installing dependencies and running the frontend locally first run pnpm i and then pnpm dev.

Backend and server

Enable a virtual environment, and then in each of the 'client/backend' and 'server' directories run pip3 install -r requirements.txt.

How to run the app

1. Run python3 idxServer.py found inside the 'server' directory.
2. Run python3 client.py found inside the 'client/backend' directory.

If any changes were made to the frontend, run pnpm build, which will export the build of the React app to the backend.