15-440: Distributed Systems Syllabus

Textbook

Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms
Andrew S. Tanenbaum & Maarten Van Steen
Published by PEarson, ISBN 0-13-239227-5, 2nd edition.

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, you may find one of the following texts, available from the library, helpful:

Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, fourth edition, by Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie.
Operating Systems Concepts seventh edition, by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
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 08/30	dga	Introduction [pdf] [key]		1.1, 1.2
Thu 09/01	dga	Communication 1, the Internet in a Day, day 1 [pdf] [key]		Chapter 2.1
Tue 09/06	dga	Communication 2, the Internet in a Day, day 2 [pdf] [key]
Thu 09/08	bryant	Go! [pdf] [txt]	Code available in Class 04 code directory.
Tue 09/13	bryant	Consistency - Classical synchronization + Go-style synchronization [pdf] [txt]	Code available in Class 05 code directory. See also Remzi's cond vars lecture notes.	Kesden concurrency notes
Thu 09/15	bryant	Remote Procedure Calls [pdf] [txt]	Code available in Class 06 code directory.	Tannenbaum 4.1-4.2
Tue 09/20	dga	Distributed Filesystems [pdf] [key]
Thu 09/22	dga	Distributed Filesystems 2 - AFS, Coda, callbacks [pdf] [key]
Tue 09/27	bryant	Time and Synchronization [pdf] [ppt]		Tannenbaum 6.1-6.2
Thu 09/29	bryant	Distributed Mutual Exclusion [pdf] [txt]		Tannenbaum 6.3
Tue 10/04	dga	Fault Tolerance 1 - Detecting and Correcting Local Faults [pdf] [key]
Thu 10/06	dga	RAID [pdf]	Lecture notes.
Tue 10/11	bryant	Concurrency Control [pdf] [txt]		Tannenbaum 8.5
Thu 10/13	bryant	Logging and Crash Recovery [pdf] [txt]		Tannenbaum 8.6
Tue 10/18		MIDTERM EXAM
Thu 10/20	dga	Consistent hashing and name-by-hash	No notes; see p2p lecture for consistent hashing.
Tue 10/25	bryant	Data-Intensive Computing and MapReduce/Hadoop [pdf] [ppt]	For more info, see the MapReduce paper, it's pretty readable. You might want to examine the Hadoop code for Word Count and Matrix multiplication.
Thu 10/27	bryant	Distributed Filesystems for MapReduce / HDFS [pdf] [txt]	Read the Google Filesystem. Optional GFS follow-up interview.
Tue 11/01	dga	Distributed Replication [pdf] [key]
Thu 11/03	dga	Peer-to-Peer [pdf]		Tannenbaum 5.2.3
Tue 11/08		No class. Remember that Facebook uses lots of big distributed systems.
Thu 11/10	bryant	DNS and Content Delivery Networks [pdf] [ppt]		Tannenbaum 5.3.3-5.3.4
Tue 11/15	bryant	Security Protocols [pdf] [txt]	See wikipedia entry for needham-schroeder.	Tannenbaum 9.1-9.2
Thu 11/17	dga	Case Study - Anonymous Routing and TOR	tor paper and one tor presentation.
Tue 11/22	bryant	Virtual Machines [pdf] [txt]	Two sets of slides. slides 1 and slides 2.	Tannenbaum 3.2
Thu 11/24		No Class, Thanksgiving Break
Tue 11/29	dga	Byzantine Fault Tolerance [pdf] [key]	See also an online lecture about BFT by Barbara Liskov
Thu 12/01		Causally Consistent Wide-Area Replication
Tue 12/06		No class - meet with course staff
Thu 12/08	TAs	Course Review
Mon 12/12		FINAL EXAM. 1pm - 4pm, Wean Hall 7500.