Distributed Algorithms

Course
Identifier: 
COM S 6120

Offered during Fall Semester of even years.

  1. Credits: 3 credit hours
  2. Instructor's or course coordinator's name: Soma Chaudhuri
  3. Textbook, title, author, and year: Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics by Hagit Attiya and Jennifer Welch, Wiley & Sons (2nd ed.), 2004. 
  4. Other supplemental materials: None

Course Information

  1. Brief description of the content of the course: The theory of distributed computation. Algorithms, lower bounds, and impossibility results. Fundamental problems including consensus, leader election, mutual exclusion, and clock synchronization. Synchronous, asynchronous, and partially synchronous distributed systems models. Shared memory and message passing systems. Fault tolerance and randomization. Wait-free object simulations. Distributed shared memory. Special topics vary from year to year.
  2. Prerequisites or co-requisites: COM S 511 or COM S 531

Topics

  1. Basic algorithms for message passing systems
  2. Leader election in rings
  3. Mutual exclusion in the shared memory model
  4. Fault-tolerant consensus
  5. Distributed shared memory
  6. Blockchains and distributed ledger objects