Papers

Each class will focus on one important topic in distributed systems. We will read and discuss in detail two representative papers on that topic (denoted review-discuss), and will have a coarser look at a few additional resources (denoted survey). All discussions and presentations will be student led, and students will play very clearly assigned roles for each paper. The roles, deadlines for submitting written reviews and responses, and other information can be found in the Course overview below.

1. Course overview (no paper discussions but please review all these resources)
   • Keshav, How to read a paper
   • Patterson, How to have a bad career in academia
   • Seltzer, How to give a talk
2. Introduction
   • Mockapetris, et.al., Development of the Domain Name System review-discuss
   • Johnson, et.al, The Maintenance of Duplicate Databases review-discuss
   • Tatebe, et.al., Introduction to Distributed System Design survey
3. Communication models
   • Birrell, et.al., Implementing Remote Procedure Calls review-discuss
   • Li, IVY: A Shared Virtual Memory System for Parallel Computing review-discuss
   • Tannenbaum, et.al., Distributed Systems Principles and Paradigms (textbook), Chapters 4.3, 4.4, 4.5 survey
   • Eugster, et.al., The Many Faces of Publish-Subscribe survey
4. Time, clocks, and global states
   • Mills, Internet Time Synchronization: the Network Time Protocol review-discuss
   • Lamport, et.al., Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System review-discuss
   • Chandy, et.al., Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of Distributed Systems survey
5. Fault tolerance: Fault models and replicated state machines
   • Schneider, Implementing Fault-Tolerant Services Using the State Machine Approach: a Tutorial review-discuss
   • Renesse, et.al., Chain Replication for Supporting High Throughput and Availability review-discuss
   • Lamport, et.al., Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System survey
   • Read about two-generals problem (e.g., wiki) survey
6. Consensus protocols
   • Lamport, Paxos Made Simple review-discuss
   • Chandra, et.al., Paxos Made Live: an Engineering Perspective review-discuss
   • Detailed execution examples for Paxos (surveyor and how-synthesizer should collaborate to prepare these examples; OK to use examples from my DS1 lecture, but if you come up with other ones, that’d be even better) survey
   • Fischer, et.al., Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process survey
   • Ongaro, et.al., In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm survey
7. Commitment protocols
   • Franklin, Concurrency Control and Recovery review-discuss
   • Lampson, et.al., Crash Recovery in a Distributed Storage System review-discuss
   • McKeown, A brief history of Consensus, 2PC and Transaction Commit survey
8. Commitment + consensus in practice (class held in CSB 453)
   • Corbett, et.al., Spanner: Google’s Globally Distributed Database review-discuss
   • Borrows, The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems review-discuss
   • Chang, et.al., Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data survey
9. Distributed processing
   • Dean, et.al., MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters review-discuss
   • Zaharia, et.al., Resilient Distributed Datasets: A Fault-Tolerant Abstraction for In-Memory Cluster Computing review-discuss
   • Overview of the Spark Ecosystem survey
   • McSherry, et.al., Scalability! But at What COST? survey
10. Distributed processing (2)
    • Abadi, et.al., TensorFlow: A System for Large-scale Machine Learning review-discuss
    • Low, et.al., GraphLab: A New Framework For Parallel Machine Learning review-discuss
    • Baylor, et.al., TFX: A TensorFlow-Based Production-Scale Machine Learning Platform survey
11. Security
    • Castro, et.al., Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance review-discuss
    • Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System review-discuss
    • Lamport, et.al., The Byzantine Generals Problem survey
    • Konstantopoulos, Understanding Blockchain Fundamentals, Part 1-3 survey (disclaimer: I didn’t read it in depth so can’t vouch for correctness, but the connection is good)