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 5050 is one of the core courses in the MSE program, and its final exam qualifies as one of the WPE-I exams in the PhD program.

Instructor:
Linh Thi Xuan Phan
Office hours: Tuesdays 12-1pm (Levine 576)

When and where:
Tuesdays/Thursdays 10:15-11:45am, LRSM Auditorium

Teaching assistants and office hours:

Course textbook:
Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 4th edition (by M. van Steen and A. Tanenbaum). You can get a digital version of this book for free; hardcopies will be available, e.g., from Amazon soon. Additional material will be drawn from selected research publications.

Prerequisites:
The course requires undergraduate-level operating systems and networking knowledge, such as CIS 3800 and NETS 212 (or the equivalence). You should also be proficient in C or C++ programming.

Workload:
The course will involve three substantial programming assignments, a group project, and two midterms. Both the programming assignments and the project involve a considerable amount of programming in C/C++, and the project requires the ability to work with your classmates in teams.

Grading:
Your letter grade will be based on the individual programming assignments (35%), the group project (30%), the midterm exams (30%), and participation (5%).

Attendance:
Class attendance is mandatory and will count towards your participation score. The participation score will be computed based on attending lectures, answering questions in class, and answering questions on Ed Discussion.

Masks:
Masks are required for all class-related activities, including lectures, office hours, exams, special sessions and project demos.

We will be using Ed Discussion 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.

The goal of the special sessions is to provide you with tools and resources that might be useful for the assignments and project. See the special sessions page for more details.

Hanbang Wang, Namita Shukla, Benedict Florance Arockiaraj, and Andrew Zhao

In certain years, we provide the PennCloud Award to project teams with the most impressive final projects. In the last Fall 2022, the award went to Hanbang Wang, Namita Shukla, Benedict Florance Arockiaraj, and Andrew Zhao. The team presented an excellent fault-tolerant PennCloud platform that is well-done in every aspect. The platform supports a complete set of services with an intuitive user interface, including e.g., a webmail service for both local and remote users, a storage service for uploading and downloading of large files in any format, and an admin console for viewing and easy controlling of frontend and backend nodes' status and data. Foundational to these services, the platform also features a solid, scalable system design with strong consistency, efficient fault detection and recovery, fast performance and great usability.

Example services of the winning project.