ECE 6102: Dependable Distributed Systems

List of Topics (Subject to Change)


The course is organized into the following modules, each of which will be covered for approximately two weeks. The material is introduced through lectures and discussions of research papers covering a subset of the listed topics.
  1. Introduction to Cloud Computing and Associated Technologies

  2. Fundamentals of Distributed Systems

    States, events, event ordering, system models, failures, failure detectors.

  3. Group Communication

    Properties of different multicasts, causal atomic multicast; Paxos; CAP Theorem.

  4. Software Replication

    Active and passive replication of software; state machine approach; replica determinism.

  5. Fault-Tolerant and Secure Storage

    Quorum and Byzantine quorum systems; secret sharing and proactive security.

  6. Peer-to-Peer Systems

    Distributed hash tables, Chord and Pastry; P2P replication; BitTorrent.
  7. Cloud Computing Software and Systems

    EC2, S3, Glacier, Cassandra, Dynamo, BigTable, Chubby, MegaStore, Spanner.
  8. Blockchain Technology

    BitCoin, proof of work concept; HyperLedger; Etherium.