15-440: Distributed Systems Syllabus

Textbooks

Text: No mandatory text for this class

The lecture notes will be available after each lecture to assist with studying -- please read them as they often contain material that goes beyond just what we covered in lecture! For supplemental reading in particular areas, please consult one of the following texts:

Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, fourth edition, by Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie.
Distributed Systems Concepts and Design, fourth edition
George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, Tim Kindberg
Operating Systems Concepts seventh edition, by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, by Tanenbaum and van Steen
Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, fourth edition, by Coulouris, et al
For the projects, please see Dave's Notes on Software Engineering for Systems Hackers.
For programming, see Unix Network Programming: Networking APIs: Sockets and XTI (Volume 1) by W. Richard Stevens.
Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by W. Richard Stevens, Addison-Wesley, 1993.

Grading

Your final grade for the course will be based on the following weights for the components of the course. The weights of the individual projects will vary slightly by the difficulty of the project:

45% Projects
15% Homework
20% Midterms
20% Final Exam

The midterms will be in-class, closed-book exams. While they may cover all material to that point in the class, their content will emphasize the material covered since the previous exam. The final exam will be a closed-book exam, covering material from the whole semester, with slight emphasis on material covered since the last midterm.

For more information about the project component, see the assignments page.

The homework will combine both textbook-like questions as well as hands-on experimental exercises. There will be three homework assignments.

Because of the importance of understanding both the theoretical and hands-on elements of systems, students must pass all three components of the course (homeworks, exams, and the projects) in order to receive a passing grade for the course. This does not affect the actual letter grade assignment unless one of the components is not completed to a passing standard.

Schedule

Also available as an ical file that you can subscribe to.

Date	Instructor	Topics	Notes	Readings
Tue 08/24	dga	Introduction [pdf] [key]
Thu 08/26	dga	Communication 1, the Internet in a Day, day 1 [pdf] [key]
Tue 08/31	dga	Communication 2, the Internet in a Day, day 2 [pdf] [key]
Thu 09/02	dga	Processes, Tasks, Threads, Abstraction [pdf] [key]
Tue 09/07	dga	Remote Procedure Calls [pdf] [key]	HW1 released on 9/8, due 9/15
Thu 09/09	dga	Local consistency - locking, race conditions, etc.	See also Ted Faber's Dining Philosopher Notes	Kesden concurrency notes
Tue 09/14	dga	Mutexes and Condition Variables and Atomic Instructions	See Remzi's cond vars lecture notes.
Thu 09/16	dga	Distributed Filesystems [pdf] [key]
Tue 09/21	dga	Distributed Filesystems 2 - AFS, Coda, callbacks [pdf] [key]
Thu 09/23	dga	Time and Synchronization [pdf]
Tue 09/28	dga	Distributed Mutual Exclusion [pdf]
Thu 09/30	dga	Fault Tolerance 1 - Detecting and Correcting Local Faults [pdf] [key]
Tue 10/05	dga	RAID [pdf]	Lecture notes.
Thu 10/07	dga	Concurrency Control [pdf]
Tue 10/12	dga	MIDTERM EXAM
Thu 10/14	dga	Logging and Crash Recovery [pdf]
Tue 10/19	dga	Distributed Replication [pdf] [key]
Thu 10/21	dga	Data-Intensive Computing and MapReduce/Hadoop [pdf] [key]	For more info, see the MapReduce paper, it's pretty readable. For more, see their follow-on work on incremental processing, percolator [pdf].
Tue 10/26	dga	Distributed Filesystems for MapReduce / HDFS	Read the Google Filesystem. Optional GFS follow-up interview.
Thu 10/28	dga	Consistent hashing and name-by-hash	No notes; see p2p lecture for consistent hashing.
Tue 11/02	dga	Peer-to-Peer [pdf]
Thu 11/04	dga	DNS and Content Delivery Networks [pdf]
Tue 11/09	dga	Security in Distributed Systems 1 - The Crypto Building Blocks [pdf] [key]
Thu 11/11	dga	Security in Distributed Systems 2 - The Systems [pdf] [key]	See wikipedia entry for needham-schroeder.
Tue 11/16	dga	No Class
Thu 11/18	dga	Case Study - Anonymous Routing and TOR	tor paper and one tor presentation.
Tue 11/23	dga	Virtual Machines	Two sets of slides. slides 1 and slides 2.
Thu 11/25		Thanksgiving Holiday
Fri 11/26		Thanksgiving Holiday
Tue 11/30	dga	Byzantine Fault Tolerance [pdf] [key]
Thu 12/02	TAs	Course Review
Fri 12/10	dga	FINAL EXAM. 1pm - 4pm, Wean Hall 7500.