CS351 Spring 2026
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 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1/21 | L0: Course introduction | MSAT Ch. 1 | |
| 1/26 | Snow Day | - | |
| 1/28 | L1: Computation and synchronization primitives | MSAT Ch. 3.1 | |
| 2/2 | L2: Communication Primitives (RPCs) | MSAT 4.1, 4.2 | |
| 2/4 | L3: Concurrency and parallelism; Common Go Bugs | ||
| 2/9 | L4: Sharding and consistent hashing; Into to MapReduce | MapReduce | |
| 2/11 | L5: MapReduce | MapReduce | |
| 2/17 | Quiz 1: Lectures 0-5 | ||
| 2/18 | L6: Time in distributed systems | MSAT 5.1, 5.2 | |
| 2/23 | L7: Failure detection, failure models, recovery | MSAT 8.1, 8.2.8, 8.3 | |
| 2/25 | L8: Distributed snapshots | MSAT 8.6, Distributed snapshots | |
| 3/2 | L9: Replication | MSAT 7.1 | |
| 3/4 | MIDTERM (Lec0-9) | - | |
| 3/16 | L10: Distributed Consensus I | Raft | |
| 3/18 | L11: Distributed Consensus II | Raft | |
| 3/23 | L12: Distributed Consensus III | Raft | |
| 3/25 | Quiz 2: Lectures 10-12 | ||
| 3/30 | L13: Consistency in Distributed Systems; Intro to Consistency Models | MSAT 7.2, 7.3, 7.5 | |
| 4/1 | L14: The Google File System | The Google file system | |
| 4/6 | L15: Distributed Transactions and Serializability | MSAT 7.2 | |
| 4/8 | L16: Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-Value Store | Dynamo | |
| 4/13 | L17: Distributed Transactions, Atomicity, Two-Phase Commit | MSAT 8.5 | |
| 4/15 | Quiz 3: Lectures 13-17 | ||
| 4/22 | L18: Spanner: Google’s Globally Distributed Database | Spanner | |
| 4/27 | L19: Spanner Part 2 - r/o transactions via snapshot isolation, safe time, commit wait | Spanner | |
| 4/29 | Final Review |