CAS CS 351 - Distributed Systems

Website for BU CAS CS 351 (Fall 2025)

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The following lecture schedule is tentative and might be updated during the semester. We will be keeping you informed of any changes via Piazza. Make sure to become familiar with the Official Semester Dates
.

MSAT refers to the textbook Distributed Systems 4th Edition (by Maarten van Steen, Andrew S. Tanenbaum).

Date Topic Assigned Reading Instructor
9/3 L0: Course introduction MSAT Ch. 1 VK
9/8 L1: Computation and synchronization primitives MSAT Ch. 3.1 AAD
9/10 L2: Communication Primitives (RPCs) MSAT 4.1, 4.2 AAD
9/15 L3: Concurrency and parallelism; Common Go Bugs   AAD
9/17 L4: Sharding and consistent hashing; Into to MapReduce MapReduce AAD
9/22 L5: MapReduce MapReduce AAD
9/24 Quiz 1: Lectures 0-5   AAD
9/29 L6: Time in distributed systems MSAT 5.1, 5.2 VK
10/1 L7: Failure detection, failure models, recovery MSAT 8.1, 8.2.8, 8.3 VK
10/6 L8: Distributed snapshots MSAT 8.6, Distributed snapshots VK
10/8 L9: Replication MSAT 7.1 AAD
10/14 Review   -
10/15 MIDTERM (Lec0-9)   -
10/20 L10: Distributed Consensus I Raft AAD
10/22 L11: Distributed Consensus II Raft AAD
10/27 L12: Distributed Consensus III Raft AAD
10/29 Quiz 2: Lectures 6-12   AAD
11/3 L13: Consistency in Distributed Systems; Intro to Consistency Models MSAT 7.2, 7.3, 7.5 VK
11/5 L14: Distributed Transactions and Serializability MSAT 7.2 VK
11/10 L15: Distributed Transactions, Atomicity, Two-Phase Commit MSAT 8.5 VK
11/12 L16: The Google File System The Google file system VK
11/17 L17: Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-Value Store Dynamo VK
11/19 L18: Spanner: Google’s Globally Distributed Database Spanner VK
11/24 L19: Spanner Part 2 - r/o transactions via snapshot isolation, safe time, commit wait Spanner VK
12/1 Quiz 3: Lectures 13-19   VK
12/3 L20: TBD   VK
12/8 L21: Research topics in Distributed Systems   VK
12/10 Final Review   VK