CS 253: Distributed Systems

–Student Success Center 216. T Th 9:30-10:50

Office hours: On demand; W 4-5 p.m.

This course provides an introduction to distributed systems. The topics covered include consistency across machines, consensus across machines, MapReduce, Distributed hash tables, Fault tolerance etc.

The material is primarily from the book Distributed Systems by Maarten Van Steen and Andrew Tanenbaum. A PDF version is downloadable from here.

A lot of the material/slides have also been borrowed from the distributed systems course developed by Prof. Harsha Madhyastha at USC (thanks Harsha!).

The slides will be posted here and will be the basis for all the tests.

1. Introduction

2. MapReduce in brief

3. Communications

4. Synchronization and Logical Clocks

5. Mutual Exclusion and Election

6. Distributed Snapshotting/Checkpointing

7. Consistency and Replication

8. Paxos and Consensus

9. Byzantine Failures and CAP Theorem

10. Chubby and Zookeeper

11. DHTs and Amazon Dynamo

12. Structured Naming

12. Reliable Group Communications and Transactions

13. Blockchains and Bitcoin

14. Speculative Paxos