Rutgers University: Distributed Computing

The course covers a broad spectrum of topics encompassing system architecture, software abstractions, distributed algorithms, and issues pertaining to distributed environments such as security. Course topics include network communications, remote procedure calls, remote file systems, distributed agreement, clock synchronization, clustering, and a variety of security and system design topics.

Lectures

Basic Principles

• Introduction to distributed systems
• Data networking & client-server communications
• Naming & Binding

RPC

• Remote Procedure Calls
• RPC case studies

Synchronization

• Concurrency control
• Transactions
• Clock synchronization
• Logical clocks
• Group communication
• Distributed Mutual exclusion & election algorithms
• Process migration and allocation stragies

Fault Tolerance / Clustering

• Fault tolerance
• Clusters
• Virtualization
• Process migration and allocation stragies
• Serverless networking

Security

• Introduction to cryptography
• Secure communication algorithms
• Authentication protocols
• Biometrics, smart cards, and CAPTCHA
• Steganography & watermarking
• System penetration & protection
• Sandboxing and code signing

Additional Topics

• Distributed file systems
• Distributed shared memory

Exams