Class Information

Lecture Schedule and Notes

Schedule for Assignments and Exams

Calendar of Important Dates

Canvas Coursepage

Useful Resources

LECTURE 

SYLLABUS TOPICS TO BE COVERED 

 January 19, 21

Course introduction and organization
    
Basic characteristics of distributed systems

·         Historical perspective

·         Notion of Middleware

·         Location transparency vs location awareness

·         Failure modes and reliability

·         Security issues

·         Synchronous and asynchronous systems

·         Communication models: send-receive model, RPC, remote evaluation, mobile code and mobile agent model, group communication and broadcast models, generative communication and tuple-spaces, publish-subscribe model, Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) model

Distributed Systems Architectures

·         Client-Server computing, Cluster computing, Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, Overlay networks, Content Distribution Networks, Grid computing, Cloud computing -- infrastructure and platform as a service, elastic computing infrastructure, Pervasive and mobile computing, context aware and location aware computing, Sensor networks, Real time control systems

January 26, 28

Service Model for distributed systems

·         Request-Reply model of service based architectures

·         Standard services over the Internet

o    HTTP, NTP, POP3 (mail), Telnet, NFS

·         Service vs. servers

·         Request-reply model and reliability issues

·         Remote Procedure Call and Remote Method Invocation

·         Multi-tiered servers and multi-threaded servers

·         General principles in designing a service

·         Distributed resource management

o    Process scheduling on a network of computers

·         Cloud model of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Design goals of distributed systems:

·         Reliability, fault-tolerance, availability

o    Data replication and consistency model

o    Process replication, service replication

·         General techniques for reliability and scalability

·         Consistency guarantees, ACID semantics, Service Level Agreements for quality of service

February 2, 4

Naming in Distributed Systems

·         Address as a name

·         Flat vs hierarchical name space

·         Symbolic names vs. opaque UID  names

·         DNS architecture – example of a scalable system

February 9, 11

Introduction to TCP/IP  Programming

·         Introduction to TCP Programming in Java

·         Programming with User Datagram Protocol (UDP Programming) in Java

·         Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation) Programming
 

February 16, 18

Synchronization and Event Ordering

·         Physical Clock Synchronization -- Network Time Protocol

·         Notion of logical clocks, event ordering, and causality

·         State of a distributed system -- notion of consistent cuts

·         Vector clocks
 

February 23, 25

Distributed Mutual Exclusion Protocols

·         Lamport's protocol

·         Ricart and Agrawal protocol

·         Tree-Based protocol

·         Maekawa's protocol

·         Leader election problem
 

March 2, 4

Fault-Tolerant Systems: Replication Management Techniques

·         Replication Management Techniques

·         State Machine model

·         Primary-Backup model 

·         Majority voting and quorum-based protocols

·         Two-Phase and Three-Phase Commit Protocols

March 9, 11

 Group Communication and Reliable Broadcast Models

·         Broadcast based communication models

o    Message diffusion, gossip, epidemic

o    Reliable broadcast model

·         Message delivery semantics -- total order, causal order

March 11 and 12

·         Mid-Term Exam  (Take-home exam based on “honor code” for academic integrity.)

Mach 16, 18

 Peer-to-Peer Distributed Systems

·         Structured P2P Storage Systems:

o    Chord

o    Pastry

o    CAN

·         Unstructured P2P Systems - Napster Gnutella

March 23, 25

Consensus and Agreement Protocols

·         Paxos protocol

·         Byzantine Agreement Protocols

Gossip and Epidemic Protocols

March 30 and April 1

Concurrency Control and Consistency Models

·         Basic concepts in concurrency control

·         ACID semantics  - serializability and isolation

·         Consistency models  - client level and service level

·         Weak consistency models

·         Eventual consistency and casual consistency

April 13, 15, 20

Distributed File Systems

·         NFS

·         Andrew

·         Sprite

April 22, 27

Security and Protection

·         Introduction to encryption protocols

·         Needham-Schroeder Authentication Protocol

·         Kerberos architecture

April 29

Task scheduling and Load Balancing

·         Load balancing

·         Task/Process migration

·         Condor system

May 7 and 8

·         FINAL EXAM   (Take-home Due May 8 by 11:59 pm)