CSCI 4510/6510: Distributed Systems and Algorithms

General Information

Instructor: Stacy Patterson (sep@cs.rpi.edu)
Instructor Office Hours: T 11:30am - 1:30pm in Lally 301

TA: Anweshit Panda (pandaa2@rpi.edu) TA Office Hours: W 3:00pm - 6:00pm in Amos Eaton 127

Lectures: MR 12pm - 1:50pm

Course Description

This course explores the principles of distributed systems, emphasizing fundamental issues underlying the design of such systems: communication, coordination, synchronization, and fault-tolerance. We will study key algorithms and theoretical results and explore how these foundations play out in modern systems and applications.

• Course Syllabus
• Gradescope (for quiz grades)
• Submitty (for course materials, discussion forum, and homework)

Quiz Schedule

Quizzes will be held during the scheduled lecture time.

• Quiz 1: Thursday 1/29/26
• Quiz 2: Thursday 2/19/26
• Quiz 3: Monday 3/16/26
• Quiz 4: Monday 4/6/26
• Quiz 5: Thursday 4/23/26

Papers and Readings

Some papers are behind a pay wall and can only be accessed from the RPI network.

• Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system, Leslie Lamport, Communications of the ACM, 1978.
• Efficient solutions to the replicated log and dictionary problems, Gene T.J. Wuu and Arthur J. Bernstein, Proceedings of the third annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing, 1984.