(Theory of) Distributed Systems
Graduate Course - Summer Term 2025
Fabian Kuhn

 

Course description

The course provides an introduction to the fundamentals of distributed systems and algorithms. The course will in particular cover the following topics:

• distributed systems models
• time and global states in distributed systems
• sychronous and asynchronous systems
• fault tolerance
• basic distributed algorithms for coordination and agreement tasks
• basic distributed network algorithms
• distributed and parallel graph algorithms
• impossibility results and lower bounds

Exam

There will be a written 2-hour exam for the lecture. The exam will take place on Thursday, 04.09. from 10:00 - 12:00 in room 101-00-036. Note that the exam starts at 10:00 and not at 09:30 as communicated in the lecture. The exam will be closed-book, i.e., you are not allowed to bring any material to the exam.

Schedule

• Lecture: Monday 14:15 - 16:00, building 101, SR 01-009/13
• Exercise Tutorial: Monday 16:15 - 18:00, building 101, SR 01-009/13

For offline questions and discussions regarding the lecture and the exercises, we use Zulip is used as our discussion forum. Information on how to access our Zulip server can be found in the technical section below.

Lecture Material

All material regarding the lecture (literature, slides, videos, etc.) are available on the lecture materials web page of the course. In order to limit access to this material, this page is only visible from within the university network (i.e., use VPN to access the page from home).

Exercises

Below you find the weekly exercise sheet that we will solve in class.

Technical Information

Data Access Zulip

The link on how to access get access to our Zulip server is available here. Note that the information is only visible from within the university network (i.e., use VPN to access the page from home or access the internet via the university eduroam)

Literature

Some of the content is for example covered by the following books:

• Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics
  Hagit Attiya, Jennifer Welch.
  McGraw-Hill Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0-07-709352 6
  
• Distributed Computing: A Locality-Sensitive Approach
  David Peleg.
  Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), 2000, ISBN 0-89871-464-8
  
Additional literature for each chapter will be provided where available.