Course Instructor: Mihai Ionescu

Syllabus:

Distributed algorithms are a very actual and important area in Computer Science.

This is a master level class, in which we assume the students are already familiar with the fundamental notions and models of distributed algorithms.

First, we will discuss about causal order and total order. We will present the problems and discuss why traditional solutions will not work in all cases. We will then discuss the possible solutions, both in academia and industry and study some of the most important research papers that appeared on these topics. A particular example of a distributed application, a collaborative text editor, will be discussed and we will see how we can relax the strong conditions from total order for this particular case by introducing the operational transformation technique.

Finally, we will discuss about distributed consensus and peer to peer systems.