\ CSE 6117, Fall 2011

CSE 6117
Theory of Distributed Computing
Fall 2011

Instructor: Eric Ruppert
Office: Computer Science Building, room 3042
Email: [my last name] @cse.yorku.ca
Telephone: (416) 736-2100 ext. 33979
Facsimile: (416) 736-5872
Lectures: Tuesdays 11:30-13:00 in room 228 of Bethune College and Thursdays 11:30-13:00 in room 101A of McLaughlin College
Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays at 14:00. You can also try dropping by my office when I'm in or making an appointment by sending me email.

Usually, the best way to contact me is by email. Please use your cse account when sending me email, and start your subject line with "[6117]". Send messages in plain text, without attachments.

Announcements

None yet.

Course Description

Can a given problem be solved in a distributed system? If so, how efficiently can it be solved? We investigate how the answers to these questions depend on aspects of the underlying distributed system including synchrony, fault-tolerance and the means of communication between processes. A tentative list of topics:

shared-memory and message-passing models of distributed systems,
mutual exclusion,
agreement problems (consensus, leader-election, Byzantine agreement, approximate agreement),
broadcast and multicast algorithms,
impossibility results and lower bounds,
the consensus hierarchy,
implementing shared data structures,
randomization in distributed computing,
self-stabilization, and
a theoretical model for mobile computing.

Marking scheme

Homework exercises 80%

Class presentation 20%

The presentation will be a 25-minute talk summarizing the results of a research paper on the theory of distributed computing that you find in the literature. We will have some checkpoints along the way before the presentations. (More information on this to come.) Good places to look for a paper include PODC or DISC conference proceedings or the journal Distributed Computing. This survey paper has a bibliography containing lots of papers that would be suitable to choose. If you have a topic in mind, I might be able to help you find a good paper if you come talk to me.

Lectures

These will be filled in as the term progresses.
The references below are intended for students who want to read more about the topics discussed in class. Sometimes the readings might be helpful for the assignments. Sometimes they will extend the ideas covered in lectures.

Sep 8: Introduction. Two Generals. (See these notes from 2006.)
Sep 13: Dijkstra's mutual exclusion algorithm [Dij65]. Notes.
Sep 15: Models of distributed systems.
Sep 20: I/O Automata [Lyn96, Chapter 8].
Sep 22: Broadcast [AW04, Chapter 2.2-2.3 or Lyn96, Chapter 15.3 or San06, Chapter 1.5, 2.1]
Sep 27: Distributed MST algorithm [GHS83 or Lyn96, Chapter 15.5]
Sep 29: Distributed MST, continued, and Leader Election [AW04, Chapter 3].
Oct 4: Leader Election [AW, Chapter 3].
Oct 6: Byzantine Agreement [AW04, chapter 5][Lynch96, chapter 6].
Oct 18: Byzantine Agreement continued.
Oct 20: Synchronous Consensus with halting failures [AW04, chapter 5][Lynch96, chapter 6].
Oct 25: Simulating registers in a message passing system [ABD95 and these notes].
Oct 27: Implementing sw snapshots from swmr registers [AADGMS93, AW04 Section 10.3, these slides (pages 10-14)]
Nov 1: Implementing counters and mwmr registers from sw snapshots [these slides (pages 15-17)]
Nov 3: Fetch-and-inc can solve 2-process consensus, but registers cannot [FLP85, AW04 Section 5.3.1]
Nov 8: Impossibility results for consensus [Her91]
Nov 10: Universality of consensus [Her91, AW04 Section 15.3], Treiber's stack [HS08 Chapter 11]. See also these slides (pages 20-27)
Nov 15: Binary Search Trees [EFRV10, these slides (pages 27-33)]
Nov 17: Renaming [AW04, Section 10.2.2]
Nov 22: Renaming [MA94], Timestamps [EFR08]
Nov 24: Timestamps [EFR08]
Nov 29: Clock synchronization [AW04 Sec 6.3, LM85]
Dec 1: Xiwen presents Symmetry breaking in distributed systems, Kyle presents The black-white bakery algorithm for mutual exclusion.
Dec 6: Bita presents Brewer's conjecture and the feasibility of consistent, available, partition-tolerant web services, Tom presents A fast distributed approximation algorithm for minimum spanning trees, Hongbin presents Minimum Congestion Mapping in a Cloud

References

There is no required textbook for the course. However, I shall sometimes recommend readings from books or papers. These references will be listed here, and the list will grow during the term. Accessing some of the links below may require you to be logged into a machine at York, so that you can access the ACM Digital Library, etc.

Books

[AW04] Hagit Attiya and Jennifer Welch. Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics, 2nd edition. Wiley, 2004.
[GR06] Rachid Guerraoui and Luís Rodrigues. Introduction to Reliable Distributed Programming. Springer, 2006.
[HS08] Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit. The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. Morgan Kaufmann, 2008
[Lyn96] Nancy A. Lynch. Distributed Algorithms. Morgan Kaufmann, 1996.
[San06] Nicola Santoro. Design and Analysis of Distributed Algorithms. Wiley, 2006.
[Tau06] Gadi Taubenfeld. Synchronization Algorithms and Concurrent Programming. Pearson Education, 2006.

Papers

This list is from the 2009 version of the course, but it gives you an idea of the kinds of topics covered. I'll add and subtract items from the list during the term.

[AADGMS93] Yehuda Afek, Hagit Attiya, Danny Dolev, Eli Gafni, Michael Merritt and Nir Shavit. Atomic snapshots of shared memory. J. of the ACM, 40(4), pages 873-890, September 1993.
[Ang80] D. Angluin. Local and global properties in networks of processors. In Proc. 12th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pages 82-93, 1980.
[AADFP06] Dana Angluin, James Aspnes, Zoë Diamadi, Michael J. Fischer and René Peralta. Computation in networks of passively mobile finite-state sensors. Distributed Computing, 18(4), pages 235-253, 2006.
[ABD95] Hagit Attiya, Amotz Bar-Noy and Danny Dolev, Sharing memory robustly in message-passing systems. J. of the ACM, 42, p124-142, 1995.
[ABDPR90] Hagit Attiya, Amotz Bar-Noy, Danny Dolev, David Peleg and Rüdiger Reischuk. Renaming in an asynchronous environment. J. of the ACM, 37(3), pages 524-548, July 1990.
[AGPV90] Baruch Awerbuch, Oded Goldreich, David Peleg and Ronen Vainish. A trade-off between information and communication in broadcast protocols. J. of the ACM, 37(2), pages 238-256, April 1990.
[BG93] P. Berman and J. Garay. Cloture votes: n/4-resilient distributed consensus in t+1 rounds. Mathematical Systems Theory 26(1), pages 3-19, 1993.
[BW01] Saâd Biaz and Jennifer L. Welch. Closed form bounds for clock synchronization under simple uncertainty assumptions. Information Processing Letters, 80, pages 151-157, 2001.
[Dij65] E. W. Dijkstra. Solution of a problem in concurrent programming control . Communications of the ACM, 8(9), page 569, September, 1965. A very early paper on mutual exclusion.
[Dij74] Edsger W. Dijkstra. Self-stabilizing systems in spite of distributed control. Communications of the ACM, 17(4), pages 643-644, November 1974.
[DM90] Cynthia Dwork and Yoram Moses. Knowledge and common knowledge in a Byzantine environment: Crash failures. Information and Computation, 88(2), pages 156-186, October 1990.
[EFR08] Faith Ellen, Panagiota Fatourou and Eric Ruppert. The space complexity of unbounded timestamps. Distributed Computing, 21(2), pages 103-115, 2008.
[EFRV10] Faith Ellen, Panagiota Fatourou, Eric Ruppert and Franck van Breugel. Non-blocking Binary Search Trees. In Proc. 29th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 131-140, 2010.
[FR03] Faith Fich and Eric Ruppert. Hundreds of impossibility results for distributed computing. In Distributed Computing, 16(2-3), pages 121-163, 2003.
[FLP85] Michael J. Fischer, Nancy A. Lynch and Michael S. Paterson. Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process. Journal of the ACM, 32(2), pages 374-382, April 1985.
[GHS83] R. G. Gallager, P. A. Humblet and P. M. Spira. A distributed algorithm for minimum-weight spanning trees. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and System Sciences, 5(1), pages 66-77, 1983.
[HMM85] Joseph Y. Halpern, Nimrod Megiddo and Ashfaq A. Munshi. Optimal precision in the presence of uncertainty. Journal of Complexity, 1, pages 170-196, 1985.
[Her91] Maurice Herlihy. Wait-free synchronization. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 13(1), pages 124-149, January 1991.
[HR95] Maurice Herlihy and Sergio Rajsbaum. Algebraic topology and distributed computing: A primer. In Computer Science Today: Recent Trends and Developments, pages 203-217. Springer, 1995.
[HS99] Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit. The topological structure of asynchronous computability. Journal of the ACM, 46(6), pages 858-923, November 1999.
[HW90] Maurice P. Herlihy and Jeannette M. Wing. Linearizability: A correctness condition for concurrent objects. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 12(3), pages 463-492, July 1990.
[Lam74] Leslie Lamport. A new solution of Dijkstra's concurrent programming problem. Communications of the ACM, 18(8), pages 453-455, August 1974.
[LL90] Leslie Lamport and Nancy Lynch. Distributed Computing: Models and methods. In Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, Volume B, Chapter 18, Elsevier, 1990. (On reserve in Steacie Library.) A good, brief introduction to the area. It describes aspects of distributed models and surveys some important early results.
[LM85] Leslie Lamport and P. M. Melliar-Smith. Synchronizing clocks in the presence of faults. J. of the ACM, 32(1), pages 52-78, 1985.
[MA94] Mark Moir and James H. Anderson. Fast, Long-Lived Renaming. In Proc. of the 8th International Workshop on Distributed Algorithms, pages 141-155, 1994. (There have been several better versions of adaptive renaming algorithms published afterwards, but I just want to cover the most basic version of the splitter algorithm. See Mark Moir's page for some of the improvements.)
[Tau04] Gadi Taubenfeld. The black-white bakery algorithm and related bounded-space, adaptive, local-spinning and FIFO algorithms. In Distributed Computing, 18th International Conference, pages 56-70, 2004.

Web Pages

Previous versions of this course: Winter 2006, Winter 2008, Fall 2008, Fall 2009.

The ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the International Symposium on Distributed Computing. These are the main conferences for the theory of distributed computing.

Exercises

Try to keep your answers as simple as possible (but no simpler).

This page was last updated on December 1, 2011

CSE 6117 Theory of Distributed Computing Fall 2011