Foundations of Distributed Systems (Integrated course, SoSe 2012)

All computing systems nowadays are distributed, ranging from Internet-scale services to multiprocessors. Therefore, understanding the principles of distributed computing is increasingly important in all aspects of designing and engineering modern computing systems.

Students that complete this module will get a basic understanding of how to design distributed algorithms, reason about their correctness, and derive complexity bounds for distributed computing problems. The notion of a system implementation is treated here in the algorithmic sense (there will be no Java or C code).

• This course will be held in Engilish.

Shared-memory and message-passing algorithms; fault-tolerance; shared-memory transformations; consensus and state-machine replication; message passing; network topologies and architectures; local algorithms and scalability; time and message complexity; leader election, medium access, graph coloring; robust algorithms for dynamic networks; peer-to-peer networks; social networks: game theory and incentive-compatible algorithms

If you are interested in attending, please make sure you are subscribed to this course in ISIS to receive information and announcements.

A module registration is also obligatory for Master studetns. Further information will be given in the lecture or via ISIS.

There will be exercises (exercise sheets). You need 50% of the possible points to pass.

Oral exam. Further information will be announced in the lecture or via ISIS.

More slides and further information (research papers, exercises) are available on the ISIS page.

• Lynch, N: Distributed Algorithms. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1996.
• H. Attiya, J. Welch. Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics (2nd edition). Wiley. 2004
• M. Herlihy and N. Shavit. The art of multiprocessor programming. Morgan Kaufman, 2008
• David Peleg, Distributed Computing: A Locality Sensitive Approach, SIM, 1987.