CSE 223B: Distributed Computing and Systems

Textbooks

There are no required textbooks for this course. The following books may help provide background for CSE 223B or help with lab programming. They are listed in rough order of usefulness.

Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms. Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Maarten Van Steen.
UNIX Network Programming. Volume 1: Networking APIs: Sockets and XTI. W. Richard Stevens.
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. W. Richard Stevens.

Each lecture (except the first) will have one assigned paper to read. You should read this paper before coming to class, and be prepared to discuss it (written evaluations are not required). Occasionally we will also list recommended papers; you are encouraged to read those, but not required.

Grading

Your final grade for the course will be based on the following weights:

30% Labs (programming assignments)
15% Midterm
40% Term project (software artifact and paper)
15% Final exam

Due to the demanding nature of the programming assignments, they will be accepted late. The complete policy for late assignments will be announced at the beginning of the term.

There are programming labs due every week and a half for the first half of the term.

In the second half of the term you'll build a system of your choice, in small groups. It is expected that this system will build on the software artifacts created as part of the lab assignments, but this is not required. You'll also write a research-style paper on that system.

Schedule

Also available as an ical file that you can subscribe to.

Date	Topics	Notes	Readings
Tue 03/29	Class overview & introduction
Thu 03/31	Distributed Shared Memory		[LH89]
Tue 04/05	Tutorial
Thu 04/07	Vector Clocks & Relaxed consistency (DSM)		[KCD+94]
Tue 04/12	Distributed Hash Tables	Lab 1 due @ 11:59PM PDT	[SML+03]
Thu 04/14	Distributed File Systems (Logging)		[LGG+91]
Tue 04/19	Distributed File Systems (Metadata)		[TML97]
Thu 04/21	Two-Phase Commit	Lab 2 due @ 11:59PM PDT
Tue 04/26	Group Communication		[BJ87]
Thu 04/28	Midterm Exam
Tue 05/03	Consensus		[L01]
Thu 05/05	Consensus (cont.)	Lab 3 due @ 11:59PM PDT	[L01]
Tue 05/10	Zookeeper	Project proposals due.	[HKJR10]
Thu 05/12	FAWN		[AFK+09]
Tue 05/17	FaRM		[DNHC14]
Thu 05/19	Byzantine Fault Tolerance		[CL99]
Tue 05/24	Optimistic Consistency	Project checkpoint	[KS02]
Thu 05/26	Anti-entropy		[TTP+95]
Tue 05/31	Spanner		[CDE+12]
Thu 06/02	Blockchain		[N08]
Thu 06/09	Final Exam 8-11am