CS 3410: Distributed Systems
| Spring 2025 | Topics | Papers (due Wednesday) |
| Jan 6–10 | Go, RPC | |
| Jan 13–17 | Go examples | GFS, Bigtable |
| Jan 20–24 (MLK Day) | Effective Go, replicated state machines | |
| Jan 27–31 | TCP, sockets, clusters | Paxos, Chubby |
| Feb 3–7 | coherent caching, CAP | |
| Feb 10–14 | transactions, 2-phase commit | Spanner, Calvin |
| Feb 17–21 (President’s Day) | time, clocks, snapshots | |
| Feb 24–28 | peer to peer | Chord, Dynamo |
| Mar 3–7 | concurrency, actors | |
| Mar 10–14 (Spring Break) | — | — |
| Mar 17–21 | databases | |
| Mar 24–28 | big data | MapReduce, RDDs (Spark) |
| Mar 31–Apr 4 | SOA, microservices | |
| Apr 7–11 | eventual consistency | S3 Node |
| Apr 14–18 | ||
| Apr 21–25 (Thursday last day) | — |
Changes to the schedule will be announced in class.
Resources
- Syllabus
- Examples from class
- Effective Go
- Recommended book: The Go Programming Language
- Go package docs
- Screencast on setting up Go and vim-go
- TCP videos
- RPC demo app in Go using Go RPC
- Paxos assignment slides
- RPC chat assignment
Papers
- The Google File System
- Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
- Paxos
- Skim the original Paxos paper: The Part-Time Parliament
- Read the simplified version in detail: Paxos Made Simple
- We will use this bare-bones protocol description for our assignment: Paxos in 25 lines
- See how Paxos is implemented in modern systems: Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?
- The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems
- Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database
- Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems
- Recommended: skim this paper first: The Case for Determinism in Database Systems
- Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications
- Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly-available Key-value Store
- MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
- Resilient Distributed Datasets: A Fault-Tolerant Abstration for In-Memory Cluster Computing
- Using Lightweight Formal Methods to Validate a Key-Value Storage Node in Amazon S3
Optional reading
- Managing Update Conflicts in Bayou, a Weakly Connected Replicated Storage System
- Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance
- Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process
- The Byzantine Generals Problem
- Session Guarantees for Weakly Consistent Replicated Data
- CAP Twelve Years Later: How the “Rules” Have Changed
- Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of Distributed Systems
- Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate’s Opinion
- Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System (AFS)
- Petal: Distributed Virtual Disks
- On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services
- Dapper, a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure
- PNUTS: Yahoo!’s hosted data serving platform
- Mesa: Geo-Replicated, Near Real-Time, Scalable Data Warehousing
- High-Availability at Massive Scale: Building Google’s Data Infrastructure for Ads
- Twitter Heron: Stream Processing at Scale
- Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications
- F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales
- Paxos Made Live—An Engineering Perspective
- Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited
- Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg
- Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System
- Exploiting virtual synchrony in distributed systems
- Conflict-free Replicated Data Types
- Foundational distributed systems papers
- Hall of fame awards. These are systems papers that have been recognized as especially important, though note that only some of them are distributed systems papers.
Last Updated 01/06/2025