Distributed Computing Syllabus 2020

Starvation, deadlocks, livelocks. Interference, fairness, safety and liveness properties. Fine-grain and coarse-grain parallelism. Review of classic problems in concurrency. Proper definition of semaphore. Weak and strong semaphores. Split-binary semaphores. Starvation-free mutual exclusion. The technique of ``passing the baton.''

1. Andrews, Chapters 1, 2, 3.1, 3.5, 4, 5, 6, and Section 10.2.
2. Jan Tijmen Udding, ``Absence of Individual Starvation Using Weak Semaphores,'' Information Processing Letters, Vol. 23, 1986, 159-162.
3. Allen B. Downey , "The Little Book of Semaphores", freely downloadable book, 201x, http://www.greenteapress.com/semaphores/

Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), and Clients and Servers. Implementation of RPC. Stub generation, marshaling arbitrary data structures. External data representation (XDR) and RPCGEN. Study of an RPC example. Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and Object Serialization of Java.

1. Andrew D. Birrell and Bruce Jay Nelson, Implementing Remote Procedure Calls, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 2, 1, pp. 39–59, 1984. A classic paper.
2. Oracle.com, ONC+ Developer's Guide; http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-1435; Reference. This is a highly recommended complete book on RPC.
3. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall16/cos418/docs/L3-rpc.pdf Slides on Distributed Programming and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)
4. Java tutorial, http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/ Focus on the RMI trail.
5. Andrews, Chapter 9.

CSP, communicating sequential processes. Asynchronous and synchronous message passing. Logical clocks, ordering of events. Heartbeat, probe/echo, and broadcast algorithms. Distributed mutual exclusion, Distributed implementation of semaphores, and distributed termination detection.

1. C. A. R. Hoare, ``Communicating Sequential Processes,'' Communications of the ACM, 1978, Vol. 21, No. 8, 666-677. http://www.usingcsp.com/ has an entire book by Hoare describing further developements.
2. Andrews, Chapters 7 and 8.

SR: Multiple primitives, Linda: Distributed data structures, and Java, JavaSpaces, Actors + Akka, and Hadoop. Distributed PLs: Erlang, Go, Scala. Distributed File Systems

1. Andrews, Chapter 10.
2. Sudhir Ahuja, Nicholas Carriero and David Gelernter, ``Linda and Friends,'' IEEE Computer (magazine), Vol. 19, No. 8, 26-34. http://www.lindaspaces.com/ has an entire book.
3. JavaSpaces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space
4. GO https://tour.golang.org/concurrency/1 Goroutines and https://tour.golang.org/concurrency/2 Channels
5. Books and Docs on Akka

Programming logic. Axiomatic Semantics. Assertions on process states. Pre-, post conditions, and loop invariants. Temporal logic.

1. Mateti, Lecture Notes on ../Lectures/FormalMethods/
2. Andrews, Chapter 2.
3. http://www.tlaplus.net/ TLA "is a logic … that consist[s] mainly of ordinary (non-temporal) mathematics with just a tiny bit of temporal logic." This site hosts a number of free software tools and articles on a subset of temporal logic developed by Lamport.
4. Leslie Lamport, Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers, Pearson Education, Inc, 2002. (A free PDF of this book, for personal use, is available at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/ Leslie Lamport is a 2013 Turing Award winner.

Concurrent algorithms and concepts are often subtle. Please participate in the class room discussions. Feel free to discuss openly, to ask what may appear to be dumb questions, and to catch any errors that I make. Be alert, study the backup material right away, and solve the exercises promptly.

No problems will be assigned specifically as ``home work.'' However, you are expected to have studied problems that appeared in the old exams of this course, and the exercises of our textbooks.

There is a local discussion wiki (see the link on the course home page) that you should read and participate regularly as a vehicle for discussing your solutions. I will read this group regularly, and note silently who is contributing what. I expect other students to be able to find flaws and fix them. Only when the most fundamental errors are being made will I break my silence and contribute a response.

There will be two exams contributing 25% plus 35% to the final grade. The date for the midterm exam will be announced in class. The date for the final exam is as set by the Registrar. Both exams are closed-book, and comprehensive. Many of the old exams for this course are available at the course home page.

It is necessary that you are comfortable in the use of networked machines based on Linux and X. It is also assumed that you are fluent in Java, C++ and Linux process-related system calls. There are programming projects using these that implement a multi-workstation oriented WhiteBoard (WB) client-server program. (It is not assumed that you are familiar with either RPC or RMI, Scala, or Akka. These will be taught in the course.)

The projects are required. Not producing demonstrable (even if faulty) projects will award you a grade no better than an F in the whole course regardless of your performance in the exams.

The projects must be work done by you as a single individual. Do not use code from other sources, not even if it was given by the instructor in a past term. The projects are evaluated both by a demo and by skimming the source code and associated documentation.

The due dates and further description of the projects are on the course home page.