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Distributed Systems

Vak
2024-2025

Admission requirements

This is a practical-intensive course, which involves low-level systems programming. Mastering all this is also highly rewarding. Students are assumed to have taken courses in advanced programming, computer architecture, computer networks, and operating systems at a BSc level. The HPC course is not a requirement, but will make things easier.

Description

Distributed systems are pervasive, most members of our society interact with them daily. Social networks, government services, and media streaming are all powered by distributed systems. Such systems are composed of many physically distributed computers, all connected through a network. Distributed systems are applied in areas such as data storage (e.g., HDFS, Ceph), data transmission and queueing (e.g., gRPC, ZeroMQ), key-value stores (e.g., Redis, Cassandra), analytics (e.g., Spark, Hive), batch (e.g., Hadoop) and stream processing (e.g., Flink), distributed supercomputing (e.g., MPI), as well as machine learning (e.g., Tensorflow, pytorch).

As computer scientists, systems engineers, or devops, most of the large-scale systems we work with, either directly or indirectly, are actually distributed systems. Both academia and industry invest significant effort into: (i) defining theory and design processes for building such systems; (ii) understanding the performance of these systems; (iii) understanding the interaction between these systems and their underlying computing infrastructure; and (iv) building more efficient systems, that seamlessly scale with the number of users, machines, and workloads.

This course is a practical, systems-first approach at understanding distributed systems. We will discuss general distributed systems topics, such as communication, consistency, fault-tolerance, consensus. We will discuss the design of distributed systems, such as which parts are these composed of (e.g., storage, resource management, scheduling, communication). We will also treat general topics on performance evaluation, such as: benchmarking, workloads, metrics, statistical analysis, and how to design repeatable experiments.

Course objectives

After following this course, students will be able to:
1. Understand the main concepts of distributed systems, e.g., communication, resource management and scheduling, consistency, fault-tolerance, performance.
2. Explain and identify trade-offs for designing certain components of distributed systems, e.g., erasure-coding vs. replication for fault-tolerance.
3. Analyse research papers, critically discuss their merit
4. Design, build, and evaluate distributed systems.
5. Evaluate performance using state-of-the-art experiment design techniques for reproducible performance evaluation.

Timetable

In MyTimetable, you can find all course and programme schedules, allowing you to create your personal timetable. Activities for which you have enrolled via MyStudyMap will automatically appear in your timetable.

Additionally, you can easily link MyTimetable to a calendar app on your phone, and schedule changes will be automatically updated in your calendar. You can also choose to receive email notifications about schedule changes. You can enable notifications in Settings after logging in.

Questions? Watch the video, read the instructions, or contact the ISSC helpdesk.

Note: Joint Degree students from Leiden/Delft need to combine information from both the Leiden and Delft MyTimetables to see a complete schedule. This video explains how to do it.

Mode of instruction

The course is composed of three components:
1. Lectures given by the instructor, to setup course format, assignments, and to teach key topics in distributed systems.
2. Self-study Lab Assignments. The assignments can be done alone or in pairs of two students. Students are expected to work on the lab assignments autonomously, outside of the lectures. This is a hands-on course, where the lab constitutes a large part of the final grade. There are two large-scale lab components: (1) a reproducibility study, where students implement several experiments from existing scientific papers, to get acquainted with modern technology and state-of-the-art in experiment design; (2) a build-your-own-distributed-system, where students learn how to build a prototype distributed system.
3. Student Presentations and in-class discussion. Each group must prepare a 15-min presentation on the reproducibility study of assignment 1. This is followed by a 5-min Q&A discussion session, where all other students participate.

Assessment method

The assessment method is based on the following student assignments:

  • Reproducibility study: 20% (group-based, mandatory)

  • Build a system: 40% (group-based, mandatory)

  • Presentation: 10% (group-based, mandatory)

  • Exam: 30% (Individual, mandatory)
    Each student must score a sufficient score (>= 5.5) in each of the four sub-parts of the grade. Partial scores will not be kept between academic years.

Reading list

M. van Steen and A.S. Tanenbaum, Distributed Systems, 4th ed., distributed-systems.net, 2023. https://www.distributed-systems.net/index.php/books/ds4/

Registration

As a student, you are responsible for enrolling on time through MyStudyMap.

In this short video, you can see step-by-step how to enrol for courses in MyStudyMap.
Extensive information about the operation of MyStudyMap can be found here.

There are two enrolment periods per year:

  • Enrolment for the fall opens in July

  • Enrolment for the spring opens in December

See this page for more information about deadlines and enrolling for courses and exams.

Note:

  • It is mandatory to enrol for all activities of a course that you are going to follow.

  • Your enrolment is only complete when you submit your course planning in the ‘Ready for enrolment’ tab by clicking ‘Send’.

  • Not being enrolled for an exam/resit means that you are not allowed to participate in the exam/resit.

Contact

Rob van Nieuwpoort

Remarks

Software
Starting from the 2024/2025 academic year, the Faculty of Science will use the software distribution platform Academic Software. Through this platform, you can access the software needed for specific courses in your studies. For some software, your laptop must meet certain system requirements, which will be specified with the software. It is important to install the software before the start of the course. More information about the laptop requirements can be found on the student website.