Spring 2012 - CS 553 (Call no 31243) Distributed Systems

Current standing spreadsheet

Instructor: Ajay Kshemkalyani
Class meeting times: T,R 11:00-12:15am
Room: SH 303
Office Hours in 915 SEO: T 2:00 - 3:00pm, and by appointment

Course Description

  1. Models: synchronous/asynchronous; shared memory/message-passing
  2. Global states and snapshots; time models and clock synchronization
  3. Distributed graph algorithms
  4. Group communication (including multicast), managing group views
  5. State predicate detection
  6. Reasoning with knowledge
  7. Distributed mutual exclusion, distributed deadlock detection, leader election, termination detection
  8. Distributed shared memory - coherence, models, register constructions, atomic snapshots (applications to multicore architectures)
  9. Checkpointing, rollback recovery; distributed debugging
  10. Agreement and consensus (with malicious and non-malicious process behavior)
  11. Failure detectors
  12. Self-stabilizing systems
  13. Peer-to-peer systems, e.g., Chord, Tapestry, Content-Addressible Network, BitTorrent
  14. other current topics, e.g., sensor networks
See detailed table of contents of the textbook below by going to the link at Cambridge University Press or Amazon. This course focuses on theoretical principles, but will have some implementation projects, (probably) using Concurrent Java/ Java RMI/sockets.

Note, there are and have been many options to write distributed and parallel programs, from Java RMI to CORBA to MPI to OpenMP to MapReduce/ Hadoop, NetBeans, (Ruby-on-Rails, i just heard recently of) that come and go quickly with technology. The course focuses on the science principles and algorithms for distributed computing while having some understanding of how they can be implemented and engineered in a real system.

Resources

Prerequisites

Algorithm analysis and design (cs401); operating systems (cs385); networks (cs450); or permission of the instructor.

Grading

The following is only a tentative breakup of the evaluation scheme and will be finalized after the second week of class, depending on the final enrollment in the course (projects and /or presentations may be individual or group).

course progress chart (will be updated as we progress)