CS 3410: Distributed Systems

Topics

• Go, RPC
• Go examples
• more Go, CAP, replicated state machines
• TCP, sockets, clusters
• coherent caching, CAP
• transactions, 2-phase commit
• time, clocks, snapshots
• peer to peer
• concurrency, actors
• databases
• big data
• SOA, microservices
• eventual consistency

Resources

• Syllabus
• Examples from class
• Effective Go
• Recommended book: The Go Programming Language
• Go package docs
• Screencast on setting up Go and vim-go
• TCP videos
  • TCP service model (16:27)
  • The end-to-end principle (10:33)
  • Sliding window (19:25)
  • Retransmission strategies (9:45)
• RPC demo app in Go using Go RPC
  1. introduction (8:22)
  2. server RPC (3:01)
  3. client RPC (4:50)
  4. command-line flags (13:58)
  5. call function (6:58)
  6. client shell (14:35)
  7. actor (15:23)
• Paxos assignment slides
• RPC chat assignment
• Chord assignment

Recommended papers

• The Google File System
• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
• Paxos
  • Skim the original Paxos paper: The Part-Time Parliament
  • Read the simplified version in detail: Paxos Made Simple
  • We will use this bare-bones protocol description for our assignment: Paxos in 25 lines
  • See how Paxos is implemented in modern systems: Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?
• The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems
• Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database
• Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems
  • Recommended: skim this paper first: The Case for Determinism in Database Systems
• Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications
• Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly-available Key-value Store
• MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
• Resilient Distributed Datasets: A Fault-Tolerant Abstration for In-Memory Cluster Computing

Additional reading

• Using Lightweight Formal Methods to Validate a Key-Value Storage Node in Amazon S3
• Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance
• Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process
• The Byzantine Generals Problem
• Session Guarantees for Weakly Consistent Replicated Data
• CAP Twelve Years Later: How the “Rules” Have Changed
• Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of Distributed Systems
• Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate’s Opinion
• Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System (AFS)
• Petal: Distributed Virtual Disks
• On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services
• High-Availability at Massive Scale: Building Google’s Data Infrastructure for Ads
• Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications
• F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales
• Paxos Made Live—An Engineering Perspective
• Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg
• Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System
• Conflict-free Replicated Data Types

Where to find more:

• Foundational distributed systems papers
• Hall of fame awards. These are systems papers that have been recognized as especially important, though note that only some of them are distributed systems papers.

Last Updated 05/04/2026