Prerequisites

CSci 5105 Distributed Systems and CSci 5103 Operating Systems

Lecture:

Mondays and Wednesdays 4:00--5:15 pm  (Mechanical Engineering Room 102)

Name:

Anand Tripathi

email:

Phone:

Office Hours:

Course Description and Format

Prerequisite: CSci 5105 (Distributed Systems) and CSci 5103 (Operating Systems) or equivalent

Course Format: The course is structured as a mix of formal lectures by the instructor,  and classroom discussions  with active involvement of students, based on the papers from the reading list papers. This course involves studying close to 50 papers on  seminal topics in distributed systems. These paperes would cover the various topics listed below and represent the cutting-edge technoligies.

Each week 2-3 papers would be discussed. . On each lecture day, two students would work with the instructor in leading and moderating the discussions.

Lectures: 65%; and Student Presentations/Discussions 35%

Course Description: The objective of this course is to learn design principles and techniques for building highly available and scalable distributed computing systems. This course presents the fundamental concepts and principles underlying large-scale distributed computing systems. Specific focus of this course is on techniques for realizing fault-tolerance, scalability, and availability of such systems. With the availability of global scale computing infrastructures, such as the Cloud computing platforms, these design methods become crucial in building large-scale systems. The course also focuses on the software stacks provided by Hadoop and Spark for large-scale distributed computing. The following topics in this course will cover fundamental principles as well as case studies based on several existing systems:

•  Process coordination in distributed systems; logical clocks and causality of events
• Group communication: atomic broadcast and causal broadcast protocols
• Message Queue Models and Systems: Kafka, RabbitMQ, Apache ActiveMQ, Apache SQS
• Agreement and consensus problems: failure models; Byzantine Agreement; Paxos protocol;
• Gossip and epidemic protocols
• P2P system architectures: Gnutella, Napster, BitTorrent. Kazza; P2P applications
• Distributed storage systems: Distributed hash tables; P2P storage systems: Chord, Dynamo, Cassandra; key-valued based NoSQL models – Google Bigtable, Hadoop/HBase
• Publish/Subscribe models – topic-based and content-based models and system architectures
• Location-bases services and context-aware computing
• Access control and authentication protocols in distributed systems; Bitcoin and Blockchain protocol
• Data replication management and consistency models: serializability; atomic transactions; weak consistency models -- causal consistency; release consistency; snapshot isolation model; eventual consistency
• Distributed File system Architectures: Google file system; Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)
• Parallel programming systems for cluster based systems: MapReduce, Pregel/Giraph, DistributedGraphLab, Beehive
• Hadoop and Spark Software Stacks for Cloud/Cluster Computing

GRADING: 

Student Conduct Code and Scholastic Dishonesty:

Cheating and other forms of scholastic dishonesty will not be tolerated.  Such activities include:

• Consulting and seeking help from others (students or non-students) on assignments and exams when asked to do an assignment problem individually.

• Consulting and seeking help from others not in your group (students or non-students) on assignments when asked to do an assignment problem in a designated group.

• Cheating on exams. Consulting others or using any material which is not permitted on the exam.

• Copying material from some source, such as the Internet or books, and presenting it as you own solution or design when asked to solve a problem yourself.

• Attempt to change an already graded assignment and asking for re-grading of that material.

• Attempts to fabricate the submission date/time of a late assignment to make it appear like an on-time submission.

• Stealing some other student's solution or program.

• Submitting solutions prepared by the TAs and the instructors during the prior years of the course offering.

• Obtaining information through the Internet and submitting it as your own work on an assignment.

• Purchasing a solution for your assignment from someone.

• All group programming assignments must be done together and each group member must be fully involved in all aspects of programming.

• You are responsible for protecting your assignment files, program code, and data on your personal computer or account.

• Giving access to your personal computer or account to another student thereby enabling the student to access to your assignmentadn work.

• Helping or abetting another student in cheating or scholastic misconduct.

You must be fully cognizant of the CSE Lab Acceptable Use Policy.  All CSE public labs users should be familiar with the full content of this document. However, in the interests of brevity, here are the basic ideas:

• Do not use your account for illegal, unethical, or unauthorized purposes.
• Protect your data with the correct file permissions, and respect others' privacy.
• Do not share your account and passwords with anybody
• Contact the system administrators if you have questions, comments, or concerns about CSE's public computing labs.
• Only use resources that have been deliberately allocated to you, i.e., do not try to circumvent security or administrative measures on the systems.
• Become familiar with the system, and avail yourself of all the resources for which you have authorization.

Any case of cheating or scholastic misconduct will immediately result in an F GRADE . Additionally, the matter would be forwarded to the Office for Student Conduct and Aacdemic Integrity.

Academic freedom is a cornerstone of the University. Within the scope and content of the course as defined by the instructor, it includes the freedom to discuss relevant matters in the classroom. Along with this freedom comes responsibility. Students are encouraged to develop the capacity for critical judgment and to engage in a sustained and independent search for truth. Students are free to take reasoned exception to the views offered in any course of study and to reserve judgment about matters of opinion, but they are responsible for learning the content of any course of study for which they are enrolled.*

Reports of concerns about academic freedom are taken seriously, and there are individuals and offices available for help. Contact the instructor, the Department Chair, your adviser, the associate dean of the college, or the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs in the Office of the Provost. [Customize with names and contact information as appropriate for the course/college/campus.]

* Language adapted from the American Association of University Professors "Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students".