Distributed Systems — Hilary Term 2024

Role: Graduate Teaching Assistant
Course: Distributed Systems (MSc Computer Science)
Term: Spring Term 2024
Format: Eight weekly tutorials (groups of 4–6 students)

Topics covered

1. Time and ordering — logical clocks, vector clocks, causality
2. Replication — primary-backup, chain replication, quorum systems
3. Consensus — Paxos, Raft, and the FLP impossibility result
4. Fault models — crash-stop, crash-recovery, Byzantine failures
5. Consistency models — linearisability, sequential consistency, eventual consistency
6. Distributed transactions — two-phase commit, saga pattern
7. Scalability — sharding, consistent hashing, load balancing
8. Real systems — case studies from DynamoDB, Spanner, and Kafka

Materials

Problem sheets and reading lists are distributed via the department’s course page. I am happy to share my tutorial preparation notes on request.