We will study some of the key building blocks – such as synchronization primitives, group communication protocols, and replication techniques – that form the foundation of modern distributed systems, such as cloud-computing platforms or the Internet. We will also look at some real-world examples of distributed systems, such as GFS, MapReduce, Spark, and Dynamo, and we will gain some hands-on experience with building and running distributed systems.

CIS 505 is one of the core courses in the MSE and EMBS programs, and its final exam qualifies as one of the four WPE-I exams in the PhD program.

Instructor:
Linh Thi Xuan Phan
Office hours: Wednesdays 1:00-2:00pm (Levine 464)

When and where:
MW 4:30-6:00pm, TOWNE 100

Teaching assistants:

Course textbook:
Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 3rd edition (by M. van Steen and A. Tanenbaum; ISBN 978-1543057386). You can get a digital version of this book for free; hardcopies are available, e.g., from Amazon. Additional material will be drawn from selected research publications.

Prerequisites:
Either undergraduate networking or operating systems is required. You should also be comfortable with programming in C/C++.

Workload:
The course will involve three substantial programming assignments, a group project, a midterm, and a final examination.

Grading:
Your letter grade will be based on the programming assignments (30%), the group project (25%), the midterm exam (15%), the final exam (25%), and your participation (5%).

We will be using Piazza for all course-related discussions.

Homework assignments and project are available for download; you can submit your solution online. If necessary, you can request an extension for your homeworks.

Bhairavi Mehta, Sarvesh Surana, Animesh Shah, Mihir Pattani, and Swathi Rajanna.

Example services of the best PennCloud platform.

The Fall 2017 PennCloud Award went to Bhairavi Mehta, Mihir Pattani, Swathi Rajanna, Animesh Shah, and Sarvesh Surana for the best final project. The team presented a solid cloud platform with a highly scalable, fault-tolerant key-value datastore at the backend that supports strong consistency and efficient replication, checkpointing and recovery. The platform offers a diverse set of services that are rich in features, such as a webmail service that supports remote users, email attachments, mail folders, and address books; a storage service that supports uploading, downloading, sharing of large files in any format; one-to-one and group chat service with FIFO ordering semantics; among others.