| Date | HTML file | Powerpoint file | Topic | 
| Aug. 24 | Introduction to the course, answers to common questions | ||
| Aug. 29 | Issues of Internet reliability. Basics of how IP and UDP work. Why the Web isn't reliable. End-to-End argument. | ||
| Aug. 31 | Everything anyone ever wanted to know about remote procedure call, and local optimizations for it. U-Net architecture. | ||
| Sept. 5 | The TCP sliding window protocol and optimizations. Why The Internet is really the bottom half of TCP | ||
| Sept. 7 | IP multicast, how multicast groups are formed, reliability and "good citizen" issues | ||
| Sept. 12 | Client-server computing, stateful and stateless architectures, MOMS, issues of server scalability | ||
| Sept. 14 | Transactions: how they work on non-distributed systems. 2PL. Extending to distributed systems (failures, 2PC) | ||
| Sept. 19 | Transactions: new ideas for transactional languages and transactions on objects. Nested transactions. Availability. | ||
| Sept. 21 | Replication and multicast problem. 2PC, 3PC and issues of failure detection | ||
| Sept. 26 | Agreement on membership as a substitute for reliable failure detection | ||
| Sept. 28 | Reliable, ordered multicast and virtual synchrony model | ||
| Oct. 3 | Using virtual synchrony: replicated data, state transfer, single and multigroup perspectives. Lightweight group motivation and concept | ||
| Oct. 5 | Relating models of consistency to cost and availability. Comparing transactional replication with virtual synchrony. | ||
| Oct. 10 | 
 | 
 | Fall break: October 7 - October 11 | 
| Oct. 12 | Guest lecture: Robbert van Renesse. System architecture considerations. Building systems with layers to enhance flexibility. Optimizations to keep performance high and costs low. Dynamically switching stacks. | ||
| Oct. 17 | How and why systems fail. Can a replicated service be more reliable than the underlying servers? | ||
| Oct. 19 | Everything you always wanted to know about CORBA, COM and OO technologies | ||
| Oct. 24 | Internet QoS issues: what does quality of service mean? IPv6 features. | ||
| Oct. 26 | Farnam Jahanian (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor): From his lecture on scalability issues in the Internet, measuring Internet behavior | ||
| Oct. 31 | Internet QoS issues: RSVP, Diffsrv and limitations | ||
| Nov. 2 | Internet QoS as a reliability issue for Internet multicast: SRM, RMTP-II. Scaling issues in each. PGM, LGM, IBM Gryphon routers. Cisco routers. | ||
| Nov. 7 | Bimodal multicast (pbcast) | ||
| Nov. 9 | Next generation internet: Will it be "unsafe at any speed"? | ||
| Nov. 14 | Real-time systems: basic ideas. Clock synchronization. CASD multicast | ||
| Nov. 16 | Real-time systems: Friedman's experiments on cluster scalability | ||
| Nov. 21 | Lecture_25 | Guest lecture: Werner Vogels. Galaxy project. Large-scale clusters | |
| Nov. 23 | 
 | 
 | No class: Thanksgiving Recess Nov. 22-Nov. 27 | 
| Nov. 28 | Scalability: how can we figure out if a technology will be adequately scalable? | ||
| Nov. 30 | Lecture_27 | Future of distributed computing |