Calendar
This is the intended calendar with topics and readings.
Papers (except when tagged as Reference or Optional) may appear in homework/finals questions.
All papers are available in Canvas (Files → “Reading”), unless linked externally.
Week 1
Tue 03/31
Northwestern Monday schedule: classes scheduled to meet on Mondays meet on this day.
Thu 04/02 — Introduction
Readings
- Google, Introduction to Distributed System Design (Canvas)
- J. Dean and S. Ghemawat, MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters, OSDI 2004 — PDF
Week 2
Tue 04/07 — Networking
Readings
- (Reference) L. Peterson and B. Davie, Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, Chapter 5: End-to-End Protocols — Book
Thu 04/09 — Communication and Organization
Readings
- K. Seemakhupt et al., A Cloud-Scale Characterization of Remote Procedure Calls, SOSP 2023 — PDF
Week 3
Tue 04/14 — Physical and Logical Clocks
Readings
- L. Lamport, Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System, CACM 1978 — PDF
Thu 04/16 — Global State
Readings
- M. Chandy and L. Lamport, Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of Distributed Systems, TOCS 1985 — PDF
Week 4
Tue 04/21 — Coordination
Readings
- P. Hunt et al., ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems, USENIX ATC 2010 — PDF
Thu 04/23 — Failure and Failure Detection
Readings
- J. Leners et al., Detecting failures in distributed systems with the FALCON spy network, SOSP 2011 — PDF
Week 5
Tue 04/28 — Consistency and Replication
Readings
- D. Scales et al., The Design of a Practical System for Fault-Tolerant Virtual Machines, ACM SIGOPS OSR 2010 — PDF
- (Optional) R. van Renesse and F. Schneider, Chain Replication for Supporting High Throughput and Availability, USENIX OSDI 2004 — PDF
Thu 04/30 — Midterm
Week 6
Tue 05/05 — Eventual Consistency
Readings
- D. Terry et al., Managing Update Conflicts in Bayou, a Weakly Connected Replicated Storage System, SOSP 1995 — PDF
Thu 05/07 — Overlay Networks
Readings
- I. Stoica et al., Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications, SIGCOMM 2001 — PDF
Week 7
Tue 05/12 — Scaling Out Key-Value Stores
Readings
- G. DeCandia et al., Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store, SOSP 2007 — PDF
Thu 05/14 — Consensus Problem and Impossibility of Consensus
Readings
- M. Fischer, N. Lynch, M. Paterson, Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process, JACM 1985 — PDF
Week 8
Tue 05/19 — Consensus
Readings
- D. Ongaro and J. Ousterhout, In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Raft), USENIX ATC 2014 — PDF
Thu 05/21 — Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Readings
- M. Castro and B. Liskov, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, OSDI 1999 — PDF
Week 9
Tue 05/26 — Distributed File Systems
Readings
- S. Ghemawat, H. Gobioff, and S.-T. Leung, The Google File System, SOSP 2003 — PDF
Thu 05/28 — Content Distribution Networks
Readings
Week 10
Tue 06/02 — Distributed Transactions
Readings
- J. Corbett et al., Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database, OSDI 2012 — PDF
- (Optional) J. Geng et al., Tiga: Accelerating Geo-Distributed Transactions with Synchronized Clocks, SOSP 2025 — PDF
Thu 06/04 — New Distributed Systems
Readings
- D. Trautwein et al., Design and Evaluation of IPFS: A Storage Layer for the Decentralized Web, SIGCOMM 2022 — PDF