CS:5620 Distributed Systems and Algorithms
Spring 2016

12:30-1:45 TTh Room 75 SH (Schaeffer Hall)


Instructor:
Sriram V. Pemmaraju
101G MLH, sriram-pemmaraju@uiowa.edu, 319-353-2956
Office Hours: 1:30-2:30 M, 10:30-11:30 W, 2:00-3:00 F (and by appointment)

Course website: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~sriram/5620/fall16/
Department website: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/

Modern life is increasingly dependent on networked services such as web searching, e-commerce, video-conferencing, stock trading and net banking, social media, video streaming, etc. Networks of sensors provide a variety of specialized services such as testing integrity of bridges, assessing nutrient content of farm soil, etc., whereas networks of mobile devices are being used for tasks such as gathering real-time blood pressure readings from patients, providing health-related alerts, etc. Also, with the increasing need to quickly process massive amounts of data, distributed systems are playing a key role in "big data" analytics. While physical networks provide the underlying connectivity, various services built on top of these networks are examples of distributed systems. The objective of this course is to study some of the foundational issues that arise in the design of distributed systems (but which may be absent in centralized or sequential systems). These issues include computing with local or partial knowledge, faults and designing fault-tolerant systems, asynchrony and the cost of simulating synchrony, randomization versus determinism in distributed settings, achieving parallelism and trade-offs between communication and computation. A tentative list of specific topics that we will cover in this course are:


Syllabus document, Information about TAs, Announcements, Quizzes, Projects, and Exams, Weekly Topics, Online Resources


Information about TAs

My 4th year PhD student, Talal Riaz is the TA for this course. Talal's office hours are from 10:30 to noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays in 101N, MLH. Talal can be reached via e-mail at talal-riaz@uiowa.edu.

Homeworks and Exams

Announcements

Weekly Topics