227-0555-00L  Distributed Systems

SemesterHerbstsemester 2022
DozierendeR. Wattenhofer
Periodizitätjährlich wiederkehrende Veranstaltung
LehrspracheEnglisch
KommentarEnrolled students will be notified by e-mail about the lecture start.


KurzbeschreibungThis course introduces the fundamentals of distributed systems. We study different protocols and algorithms that allow for fault-tolerant operation, and discuss practical systems that implement these techniques.
LernzielThe objective of the course is for students to understand the theoretical principles and practical considerations of distributed systems. This includes the main models of fault-tolerant distributed systems (crash failures, byzantine failures, and selfishness), and the most important algorithms, protocols and impossibility results. By the end of the course, students should be able to reason about various concepts such as consistency, durability, availability, fault tolerance, and replication.
InhaltWe discuss the following concepts related to fault-tolerant distributed systems: client-server, serialization, two-phase protocols, three-phase protocols, paxos, two generals problem, crash failures, impossibility of consensus, byzantine failures, agreement, termination, validity, byzantine agreement, king algorithm, asynchronous byzantine agreement, authentication, signatures, reliable and atomic broadcast, eventual consistency, blockchain, cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum, proof-of-work, proof-of-*, smart contracts, quorum systems, fault-tolerant protocols such as piChain or pbft, distributed storage, distributed hash tables, physical and logical clocks, causality, selfishness, game theoretic models, mechanism design.
SkriptA script is available on the web page.
LiteraturThe script is self-contained, but links to additional material are available on the web page.
Voraussetzungen / BesonderesThis lecture takes place in roughly the second half of the semester, as the lecture is the second part of the lecture "Computer Systems" (252-0217-00). Students may attend at most one of the two lectures, NOT both.