Distributed Systems
2006-07

Here are the postscript/pdf/ppt versions of the course notes.

• DS2007.ps, DS2007.pdf
• Refs-Study.ps, Refs-Study.pdf
• 1-intro.ppt
• 2-time.ps, 2-time.pdf
• 3-cons-algs.ps, 3-cons-algs.pdf
• 4-middleware.ppt, 4-middleware.pdf
• 5-naming.ps, 5-naming.pdf
• 6-access.ps, 6-access.pdf
• 7-caseSt.ppt
• 8-storage.ps, 8-storage.pdf
• and, for the last lecture, revision.ps, revision.pdf

http://dsonline.computer.org/ is an online magazine of the IEEE Computer Society. Click on the topic areas for tutorial and other information on those subjects.

Some of the chapters of "Operating Systems, Concurrent and Distributed Software Design" by Jean Bacon and Tim Harris, Addison Wesley 2003, are relevant to this course.

ch7 Fundamentals of distributed systems
ch16 Distributed IPC (but not in detail)
ch22 Distributed transactions
ch23 Distributed algorithms
ch28 The World-Wide Web
ch29 Middleware

Each chapter has exercises. There is a web-browsable Instructor's Guide which is normally for teachers, password-protected, via Addison Wesley. It is available - here - *for local use only*. Please respect this.

If you have access to "Concurrent Systems" Edition 2 by Jean Bacon, the following chapters are relevant:

ch5 Fundamentals of distributed systems (much the same as in Operating Systems)
ch15 Distributed IPC (updated for OS - detail not required)
ch21 Distributed transactions (much the same as in OS)
ch22 Distributed algorithms (much the same as in OS)
ch26 Middleware (significantly updated for OS. CORBA hasn't changed much)

At SOSP17, Dec 99, Jerome Saltzer of MIT gave a keynote address which included some spectacular failures of large-scale system design. Here is the pdf: Saltzerthumbnails.pdf.