Principles of Distributed Computing (FS 2017)

Course catalogue • Previous year • PODC lecture collection

Distributed computing is essential in modern computing and communications systems. Examples are on the one hand large-scale networks such as the Internet, and on the other hand multiprocessors such as your new multi-core laptop. This course introduces the principles of distributed computing, emphasizing the fundamental issues underlying the design of distributed systems and networks: communication, coordination, fault-tolerance, locality, parallelism, self-organization, symmetry breaking, synchronization, uncertainty. We explore essential algorithmic ideas and lower bound techniques, basically the "pearls" of distributed computing. We will cover a fresh topic every week.

• Course pre-requisites: Interest in algorithmic problems. (No particular course needed.)
• Course language: English
• Lecture by Roger Wattenhofer and Mohsen Ghaffari, Wednesdays 8-10 in CAB G 11
• Exercises organized by Thomas Ulrich and Darya Melnyk (for Prof. Wattenhofer's part), and Manuela Fischer and Jara Uitto (for Prof. Ghaffari's part)
  • Exercise A: Wednesdays 10-12 in CAB G 56
  • Exercise B: Wednesdays 13-15 in LFW C 11
  • Both exercise sessions offer identical content. Please go to the exercise session which better fits your personal schedule.

News

• March 2, 2017: The schedule of the lectures has been updated.
• March 6, 2017: Lecture notes, Algorithm 2.11 has been updated.
• May 15, 2017: Second bonus round announced.
• June 1, 2017: We've uploaded some exams from previous years.
• July 20, 2017: We've uploaded a solution for exercise sheet 5 and we've updated the lecture notes of chapter 13.
• July 21, 2017: Date and time of the Q&A session have been announced.
• August 3, 2017: We've uploaded updated versions of the following files, where a few typos and minor mistakes have been fixed:
  • Lecture notes for chapters 5, 7, 8 and 13,
  • Solutions for exercise sheets 5, 8, 9 and 13.

Exam

Exam review

• To take a look at your corrected exam in Moodle, please follow this link.
• You can download a PDF version of the exam including a sample solution.
• If you have questions on the grading or if you want so see the exam papers that you handed in, please come to our review sessions (see below).

The following exam questions have been graded by Prof. Wattenhofer's group:

• Ex. 2: Arrow & Ivy (questions 13-17)
• Ex. 3: Sorting Networks (questions 18, 19)
• Ex. 4: Very Small Radius (questions 20-22)

Prof. Wattenhofer's group offers two review sessions:

• Tuesday, September 26, 9:00-12:00
• Monday, October 2, 13:00-16:00

Both sessions take place in the office of our secretary Susann Arreghini, ETZ G 88. Please bring your legi for identification; you won't be allowed to see your exam papers without this.

The following exam questions have been graded by Prof. Ghaffari's group:

• Ex. 5: Global Computations (question 23)
• Ex. 6: Special Coloring (question 24)
• Ex. 7: Combinatorics of Radio Transmissions (question 25)

Their review session takes place on Wednesday, September 27, 13:00-16:00 in CAB G 15.2.

Exam preparation

The following parts of the lecture notes have not been covered in the lecture and are therefore not relevant for the exam:

• Chapter 3: From Section 3.3 (Counting Networks), only the basic definitions are relevant.
• Chapter 4: Read/Write Caching (Algorithm 4.7 and Theorem 4.8) is not relevant.
• Chapter 7: Ramsey Theory
• Chapter 12: Random Delays Method
• Chapter 12: α-congestion β-dilation shortcuts

Here are some old exams from previous years: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016 (including a sample solution).
Please be aware that the topics covered in this course have changed several times over the years. Therefore, some questions in these exams don't match the content of this year's course.

Lecture material

References

These books are available at CS text book collection.

[peleg]	Distributed Computing: A Locality-Sensitive Approach David Peleg. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), 2000, ISBN 0-89871-464-8
[aw]	Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics Hagit Attiya, Jennifer Welch. McGraw-Hill Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0-07-709352 6
[hkpru]	Dissemination of Information in Communication Networks Juraj Hromkovic, Ralf Klasing, Andrzej Pelc, Peter Ruzicka, Walter Unger. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, 2005, ISBN 3-540-00846-2
[leighton]	Introduction to Parallel Algorithms and Architectures: Arrays, Trees, Hypercubes Frank Thomson Leighton. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1991, ISBN 1-55860-117-1
[clr]	Introduction to Algorithms Thomas Cormen, Charles Leiserson, Ronald Rivest. The MIT Press, 1998, ISBN 0-262-53091-0 oder 0-262-03141-8

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