(Theory of) Distributed Systems
Summer Term 2021
Fabian Kuhn (some lectures by Alkida Balliu and Dennis Olivetti)
Lecture Recordings and Material
| Date | Topic | Recording | Slides | Reading Material |
| 19.04.2021 | Introduction, Two Generals |
|
|
Introduction: Chapter 1
and Chapter 2
of [Aspnes] Two Generals: Chapter 8 of [Aspnes] |
| 26.04.2020 | Broadcast, Convergecast, Spanning Trees |
|
|
Chapter 2
of [Wattenhofer] Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 of [Aspnes] |
| Recording and slides are from the lecture of 2020. | ||||
| 03.05.2021 | Leader Election in Rings |
|
|
Chapter 3
of [Wattenhofer] Chapter 5 of [Aspnes] |
| 10.05.2021 | Causality in Distributed Systems |
|
|
Chapter 6 of [Aspnes] |
| Recording and slides are from the lecture of 2019. | ||||
| 17.05.2020 | Consensus I |
|
|
Chapter 11 and Chapter 18 of [Aspnes] |
| Chapter 11 of [Aspnes] proves the impossibility of asynchronous consensus for message-passing systems, while in the lecture, we did the same proof for shared memory systems. Chapter 18 of [Aspnes] contains much more details about the consensus hierarchy than discussed in the lecture. | ||||
| 31.05.2021 | Consensus II |
|
|
Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 of [Aspnes] |
| Chapters 9 (on synchronous consensus) and 10 (on Byzantine agreement) of [Aspnes] contain more details than what we discussed in the lecture. | ||||
| 07.06.2021 | Coloring and MIS |
|
|
The coloring algorithm for rooted trees also appears in Chapter 1 of [Wattenhofer] |
| Lecture by Alkida Balliu. | ||||
| 14.06.2021 | Randomized Coloring & MIS |
|
|
The randomized MIS algorithm also appears in Chapter 7 of [Wattenhofer] |
| Lecture by Dennis Olivetti. | ||||
| 21.06.2021 | Locality Lower Bounds |
|
|
Linial's original version of the lower bound for 3-coloring rings is described in Chapter 8 of [Wattenhofer]. The simpler proof that was discussed in the lecture appeared in [Laurinharju,Suomela]. |
| Lecture by Dennis Olivetti. | ||||
| 28.06.2021 | CONGEST Model - Bandwidth Limitations |
|
|
See also Chapter 10 of [Wattenhofer]. |
| Lecture by Alkida Balliu. | ||||
| 05.07.2021 | Synchronization |
|
|
Chapter 11 of [Wattenhofer]. |
| 12.07.2021 | Massively Parallel Computations |
|
|
Further details and a more advanced coverage of the topic can for example be found in Chapter 3 of [Ghaffari: Massively Parallel Algorithms]. |
Literature / Reading Material
| [Aspnes] | Lecture Theory of Distributed Systems of James Aspnes at Yale University |
| Lecture notes of the lecture held in Spring 2020. | |
| [Wattenhofer] | Lecture Principles of Distributed Computing of Roger Wattenhofer at ETH Zurich |
| Lecture note collection. In part, the same lecture was also held under the name Network Algorithms by F. Kuhn in Freiburg. |
|