Calendar

This is the intended calendar with topics and readings.
Papers (except when tagged as ref) may appear in homework/finals questions.

All papers are available in Canvas (Files → “Reading”), unless linked externally.


Week 1

Tue 04/01

Northwestern Monday schedule: classes scheduled to meet on Mondays meet on this day.

Thu 04/03 — Introduction

Readings


Week 2

Tue 04/08 — Networking

Readings

Thu 04/10 — Communication and Organization

Readings


Week 3

Tue 04/15 — Physical and Logical Clocks

Readings

Thu 04/17 — Global State

Readings


Week 4

Tue 04/22 — Coordination

Readings

Thu 04/24 — Failure and Failure Detection

Readings


Week 5

Tue 04/29 — Consistency and Replication

Readings

Thu 05/01 — Eventual Consistency

Readings


Week 6

Tue 05/06 — Overlay Networks

Readings

Thu 05/08 — Scaling Out Key-Value Stores

Readings


Week 7

Tue 05/13 — Consensus Problem and Impossibility of Consensus

Readings

Thu 05/15 — Consensus

Readings


Week 8

Tue 05/20 — Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Readings

Thu 05/22 — Distributed File Systems

Readings


Week 9

Tue 05/27 — Content Distribution Networks

Readings

Thu 05/29 — Transactions

Readings

  • (TBD / announced in class)

Week 10

Tue 06/03 — Distributed Transactions

Readings

Thu 06/05 — New Distributed Systems

Readings