Theory of Distributed Systems (Summer 2025)
Topical
- Logbook, with details about schedule and material.
- More details about the course will be published here in due time.
Organizational
- Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Martin Hoefer
- Exercises: Lars Huth, Sukanya Pandey
- RWTH Online: course page, exercise page
- Room in RWTH Moodle
- Lectures:
Mondays, 08:30 - 10:00h in AH I (Informatikzentrum)
Tuedays, 10:30 - 12:00h in AH I (Informatikzentrum) - Exercises: TBD
- First Exam: TBD. (written exam)
- Second Exam: TBD. (written exam)
Material
Lecture Notes
Will be published here.
Exercise Sheets
Weekly exercise sheets will be published via Moodle. Solutions must be composed by groups of (initially) 3 students.
Your solutions must be submitted as a single PDF file via Moodle.
If you score at least 75%, you can obtain one grading step bonus for the exam. To receive the bonus, you must pass the exam, and at least one solution must be presented during an exercise session.
Topic
The course gives an introduction to theoretical and algorithmic foundations of distributed systems that are composed of many processing units. For message passing models we discuss algorithms that solve broadcast, tree construction, coloring, or independent set problems. We study basic networking problems like routing, contention resolution, or congestion minimization from a decentralized perspective, including learning-based and game-theoretic approaches.
Literature
- [P] Peleg. Distributed Computing: A Locality-Sensitive Approach. SIAM, 2000.
Free sample at Google Books. - [AW] Attiya, Welch. Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics. Wiley, 2004.
- [L] Leighton. Introduction to Parallel Algorithms and Architectures: Arrays, Trees, Hypercubes. Morgan Kaufmann, 1992.