COMPSCI 512 Distributed Systems: Syllabus

Here is the tentative schedule for lectures and assignment deadlines. All information is subject to change, and please check this page periodically for the updated schedule. You can view the video capture at Panopto.

Date Title Assigned Readings Recordings
08/26 Tue L1: Intro, L2: Cryptography Primitives, L3: SSH Recording
08/28 Thu L4: Certificate Vetting and Revocation CRLite: A Scalable System for Pushing All TLS Revocations to All Browsers Recording
09/02 Tue L5: Evolution of a Content Delivery Network (1) The Akamai Network: A Platform for High-Performance Internet Applications
(2) Algorithmic Nuggets in COntent Delivery
(3) Protecting Websites from Attack with Secure Delivery Networks
Recording
09/04 Thu L5: Evolution of a Content Delivery Network (cont.) Recording
09/09 Tue L6: Akamai War Stories Partial Zoom recording, Recording from Fall 2024
09/11 Thu L7: Peer-to-Peer Lookup and Content Delivery (1) Consistent Hashing and Random Trees: Distribted Caching Protocols for Relieving Hot Spots on the World Wide Web
(2) Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications
(3) Dissecting BitTorrent: Five Months in a Torrent's Lifetime
Recording
09/16 Tue L8: DDOS Attacks and Application-Layer Attacks Protecting Websites from Attack with Secure Delivery Networks Recording
09/18 Thu L9: MapReduce MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters Recording
09/23 Tue L10: ZooKeeper ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems Recording
09/25 Thu L11: Google File System The Google File System Recording
09/30 Tue L12: Distributed File Systems (1) Sun's Network File System
(2) The Andrew File System (AFS)
Recording
10/02 Thu L13: Consensus: Byzantine Failures (Bitcoin) Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System Recording
10/07 Tue Exam 1
10/09 Thu L14: Ethereum Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform Recording
10/14 Tue Fall Break - No Class
10/16 Thu L15: Bigtable Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data Recording
10/21 Tue L16: Spark Resilient Distributed Datasets: A Fault-Tolerant Abstraction for In-Memory Cluster Computing Recording
10/23 Thu L17: Spanner Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database Recording
10/28 Tue L18: Remote Procedure Calls (Keynote File) Implementing Remote Procedure Calls Recording
10/30 Thu L19: Consensus: Fail-Stop Failures (Raft) In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm Recording
11/04 Tue L20: Memcached Scaling Memcache at Facebook Recording
11/06 Thu L21: TensorFlow TensorFlow: A system for large-scale machine learning Recording
11/11 Tue L22: Ray Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications Recording
11/13 Thu Exam 2
11/18 Tue Project Presentations
11/20 Thu Project Presentations
11/25 Tue L23: Health Monitoring with Wireless Sensors and Machine Learning Through-Wall Human Mesh Recovery using Radio Signals
Last updated: 08/2025