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Lecture Notes

This section contains the instructor's notes that are used to structure the course's lectures.
LEC # TOPICS
1 Course Overview. Synchronous Networks. Leader Election in Synchronous Ring Networks. (PDF - 2.0 MB)
2 Basic Computational Tasks in General Synchronous Networks: Leader Election. Breadth-First Search. Shortest Paths, Broadcast and Convergecast. (PDF - 1.9 MB)
3 Spanning Trees. Minimum Spanning Trees. (PDF - 2.1 MB)
4 Fault-Tolerant Consensus Problems. Link Failures: The Two Generals problem. Process Failures (Stopping, Byzantine). Algorithms for Agreement with Stopping and Byzantine Failures. Exponential Information Gathering. (PDF - 1.5 MB)
5 Number-Of-Processor Bounds for Byzantine Agreement. Weak Byzantine Agreement. Time Bounds for Consensus Problems. (PDF - 2.5 MB)
6 Other Kinds of Consensus Problems: k-Agreement. Approximate Agreement. Distributed Commit. (PDF - 1.3 MB)
7 Asynchronous Distributed Computing. Formal Modeling of Asynchronous Systems Using Interacting State Machines (I/O Automata). Proof Methods. (PDF - 2.0 MB)
8 Asynchronous Message-Passing Systems. Modeling Asynchronous Message-Passing Systems. Basic Computational Tasks in Asynchronous Networks. Leader Election. Breadth-First Search, Shortest Paths, Broadcast and Convergecast. (PDF - 2.3 MB)
9 Spanning Trees in Asynchronous Networks. Minimum Spanning Trees. (PDF - 2.2 MB)
10 Synchronizers. Synchronizer Applications. Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Distributed Systems. (PDF - 1.9 MB)
11 Asynchronous Shared-Memory Systems. Modeling. The Mutual Exclusion Problem. Mutual Exclusion Algorithms. (PDF - 2.2 MB)
12 More Mutual Exclusion Algorithms (PDF - 2.0 MB)
13 Bounds on Shared Memory for Mutual Exclusion. Resource Allocation. The Dining Philosophers Problem. (PDF - 2.5 MB)
14 Impossibility of Consensus in Asynchronous Shared Memory Systems. (PDF - 2.4 MB)
15 Atomic Objects
16 Atomic Snapshot Algorithms. Atomic Read/Write Register Algorithms. (PDF - 2.1 MB)
17 Translations Between Asynchronous Network Model and Asynchronous Shared Memory Model. Impossibility of Consensus in Asynchronous Network Models. Failure Detectors. Consensus and Atomic Broadcast. (PDF - 1.8 MB)
18 Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events. State-Machine Simulation. Applications. (PDF - 2.0 MB)
19 Stable Property Detection. Distributed Termination. Global Snapshots. Deadlock Detection. (PDF - 1.7 MB)
20 Reliable Communication Using Unreliable Channels (PDF - 2.0 MB)
21 Timing-Based Systems. Modeling and Verification. (PDF - 2.3 MB)
22 Timing-Based Systems. Mutual Exclusion. Consensus. (PDF - 3.6 MB)
23 Student Presentations. Topics To Be Announced.
24 Student Presentations
25 Student Presentations
26 Student Presentations