EE 382N: Distributed Systems Syllabus

EE 382 N Vijay Garg Spring 2010

EE 382N: DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
Spring 2010

Instructor: Prof. Vijay Garg ; Office: ACES 5.436; Phone: 471-9424 ; e-mail: garg AT ece.utexas.edu;
Office Hours: TTh 3:30-5:00 (or by appointment);
URL: http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~garg
TA : Bharath Balasubramanian (bbharath AT mail.utexas.edu)

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:

Programming Concepts: Datagram Sockets, TCP sockets, Java RMI
Models of Distributed Computation: Interleaving model, Happened before relation
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, total, multicast protocols.
Global Computation: Elections, Spanning Trees, Synchronizers.
Consensus: FLP Result, Synchronous systems, Byzantine Agreement
Fault-tolerance: Failure Detectors, Checkpointing, optimistic and pessimistic recovery, Self-stabilizing algorithms, Replicated and Fusible State Machine Approaches.

Grading: 25 % Assignments, 25 % Exam 1 (in-class), 20% Term paper, 30 % Exam 2.

Textbook :
Concurrent and Distributed Computing in Java by Vijay K. Garg, Wiley & Sons, 2004.

http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~garg/sp10/382n-opt3/ 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."