EE 382N: Distributed Systems Syllabus

EE 382 N Vijay Garg Spring 2006

EE 382N: DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
Spring 2006
TTh 3:30 - 5:00
ENS 126
Unique No. 15925

Instructor: Prof. Vijay Garg ; Office: ACE 5.436; Phone: 471-9424 ; e-mail: garg@ece.utexas.edu;
Office Hours: MW 2:00-3:30 (or by appointment);
URL: http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~garg

Prerequisites: Programming experience, Graduate standing

Course Contents: This will be an introductory graduate level course in distributed systems. It will expose students to theoretical as well as practical aspects of designing such systems. The course assumes that the student has some familiarity with programming. There is no final exam but there will be two exams during the course. The following topics will be covered in the course:

Models of Distributed Computation: Happened before relation, posets, lattices
Time: Logical clocks, vector clocks, direct dependency clocks, matrix clocks.
Resource Allocation: Mutual Exclusion, Drinking Philosophers, Election
Global Property Evaluation: Chandy and Lamport's algorithm, termination detection, unstable properties.
Ordering of Messages: causal, synchronous, multi-cast protocols.
Global Computation: Diffusing computation, supervised computation.
Consensus: FLP Result, Synchrnous systems, Byzantine Agreement
Fault-tolerance: Failure Detectors, Checkpointing, optimistic and pessimistic recovery, Self-stabilizing algorithms.

Grading: 25 % Assignments, 25 % Exam 1 (in-class), 20% Term paper, 5% Class presentation 25 % Exam 2.

Textbook :
Elements of Distributed Computing by Vijay K. Garg, Wiley & Sons, 2002. The textbook will be supplemented with a set of papers that will be made available via web.

Directory that contains handouts for the course

Course Evaluation: Standard ; Add/Drop Policy: Standard.
Disabilities statement: "The University of Texas at Austin provides upon request appropriate academic accommodations for qualified students with disabilities. For more information, contact the Office of the Dean of Students at 471-6259, 471-4641 TTY."