1. Distributed Systems (15-440)
Mohammad Hammoud
December 3, 2015

2. The course aims at providing an in-depth and hands-on understanding on
Course Objectives
The course aims at providing an in-depth and hands-on understanding on
How modern distributed systems meet the demands of contemporary distributed applications
Distributed system programming models and analytics engines
Principles on which distributed systems are optimized
Principles on which distributed systems are based

3. List of Topics Considered: a reasonably critical and
comprehensive understanding.
Thoughtful: Fluent, flexible and efficient
understanding.
Masterful: a powerful and illuminating
.1.
Architectures and Communications
.2.
Naming
.3.
Synchronization
.4.
Consistency and Replication
.5.
Fault Tolerance
.6.
Programming Models
.7.
Distributed File Systems
.8.
Cloud Computing & Virtualization

4. Course Content Course Overview and Introduction (2 Lectures):
Why distributed systems?
Defining distributed systems
Course overview and intended learning outcomes
Trends in distributed systems
High performance platforms
Mobile and ubiquities computing
Cloud computing
Etc.,
Challenges in designing distributed systems
Heterogeneity, openness, security, scalability, reliability, concurrency, transparency and quality of service

5. Course Content Architectural Models (1 Lecture):
Client-server, peer-to-peer, tiered and layered architectures
Networking (1 Lecture):
Types of networks
Networking principles:
Packet transmission
Network Layers (Physical, data-link, network and transport layers)
Congestion control

6. Course Content Communication Paradigms (1 Lecture):
Socket communication
TCP and UDP sockets
Remote invocation
RPC and RMI
Indirect communication
Message-queuing, publish-subscribe, and group communication systems

7. Course Content Naming (2 Lectures): Flat naming Structured naming
Broadcasting, forwarding pointers, home-based naming, and distributed hash tables
Structured naming
Hierarchical name spaces, name resolution, linking and mounting
Attribute-based naming
LDAP and RDF

8. Course Content Synchronization (3 Lectures): Time synchronization
Physical clocks (UTC, Cristian & Berkeley Algorithms and Network Time Protocol)
Logical clocks (Lamport and vector clocks)
Distributed Mutual Exclusion
Permission-based
Token-based
Election Algorithms
Bully and Ring algorithms

9. Course Content Consistency and Replication (3 Lectures):
Data-Centric Consistency Models:
Continuous, Sequential and Causal Models
Client-Centric Consistency Models:
Eventual consistency and client consistency guarantees
Replica Management:
Server and content replication and placement strategies
Consistency Protocols:
Primary-based, replicated-write and cache coherence protocols

10. Course Content Distributed Programming Models (5 Lectures):
Classical programming models
Shared-memory and message-passing models
MPI Library
Point-to-point and group communication routines
Hadoop MapReduce, Google’s Pregel and CMU’s GraphLab
The parallelism models
The programming models
The architectural models
The computational models
Task/Vertex/Job scheduling
Distributed application suitability

11. Course Content Fault-Tolerance (3 Lectures) Failure models
Crash, omission, timing, response and byzantine models
Process resilience and agreement protocols
Lamport’s agreement protocol
Reliable communication
Request-reply reliable communication (Request-reply call semantics)
Group reliable communication (Virtual synchrony and atomic multicasting)
Recovery (Checkpointing and message-logging)

12. Course Content Distributed File Systems: DFS Aspects:
Architectures (Client-server, cluster-based, and symmetric architectures)
Processes (Stateless vs. state-full processes)
Communication
Naming
Synchronization
Consistency and replication
Fault-tolerance