Distributed Systems syllabus

Defining Distributed Systems, Characteristics, Middleware and Distributed Systems. Design goals: Supporting resource sharing, Making distribution transparent, Open, Scalable, Pitfalls. Types of Distributed Systems: High Performance Distributed Computing, Distributed Information Systems, Pervasive Systems. Architectural styles: Layered architectures, Object based architectures, Publish Subscribe architectures. Middleware organization: Wrappers, Interceptors, Modifiable middleware. System architecture: Centralized, Decentralized, Hybrid, Example architectures – Network File System, Web.

Introduction: Layered Protocols, Types of Communication, Remote Procedural Call- Basic RPC Operation, Parameter Passing, RPC-based application support, Variations on RPC, Example: DCE RPC, Remote Method Invocation. Message Oriented Communication: Simple Transient Messaging with Sockets, Advanced Transient Messaging, Message Oriented Persistent Communication, Examples. Multicast Communication: Application Level Tree-Based Multicasting, Flooding-Based Multicasting, Gossip-Based Data Dissemination.

Clock Synchronization: Physical Clocks, Clock Synchronization Algorithms. Logical Clocks – Lamport’s Logical clocks, Vector Clocks. Mutual Exclusion: Overview, Centralized Algorithm, Distributed Algorithm, Token-Ring Algorithm, Decentralized Algorithm .Election Algorithms: Bully Algorithm, Ring Algorithm. Location Systems: GPS, Logical Positioning of nodes, Distributed Event Matching. Gossip-Based Contribution: Aggregation, A Peer-Sampling Service, Gossip-Based Overlay Construction.

Names, Identifiers, Addresses, Flat Naming, Structured Naming, Attributed Based Naming, Introduction to Distributed File Systems, File Service Architecture.

Case study: Suns Network file System, Andrew File System.

Introduction: Reasons for Replication, Replication as Scaling Technique. Data-Centric Consistency Models: Continuous Consistency, Consistent Ordering of Operations. Client-Centric Consistency Models: Eventual Consistency, Monotonic Reads, Monotonic Writes, Read Your Writes, Writes Follow Reads. Replica Management: Finding the best server location, Content Replication and Placement, Content Distribution, Managing Replicated Objects. Consistency Protocols: Continuous Consistency, Sequential Consistency, Cache Coherence Protocols, Example: Caching, and Replication in the web.

Introduction to Fault Tolerance: Basic Concepts, Failure Models, Failure Masking by Redundancy. Process Resilience: Resilience by Process Groups, Failure Masking and Replication, Example: Paxos, Consensus in faulty systems with crash failures, some limitations on realizing Fault Tolerant tolerance, Failure Detection. Reliable Client Server Communication: Point to Point Communication, RPC Semantics in the Presence of Failures. Reliable Group Communication: Atomic multicast, Distributed commit. Recovery: Introduction, Check pointing, Message Logging, Recovery Oriented Computing.