Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Description:This course will introduce current research topics in distributed algorithms comprising recently developed distributed computing models, applications, algorithms, lower bounds, impossibilities, and analysis techniques.

CourseContent:The course will be modular in nature with each module focusing on a specific topic that is of current research interest. The topics are likely to be drawn from (but not limited to) the following broad areas. I. Peer-to-Peer computing models with an emphasis on clique models like the congested clique and the node capacitated clique. II. Foundations of fault tolerant and secure distributed computing despite crashed nodes, semi-honest nodes, and malicious/Byzantine nodes. III. Distributed computing on dynamic networks comprising both edge dynamic models as well as models that exhibit churn. IV. Distributed computing models like the massively parallel computing model and the k-machine model aimed at large scale data processing, with particular emphasis on large scale graph processing. V. Distributed computing models for mobile agents and swarm robotics. VI. Distributed computing ideas in a variety of application contexts such as distributed trust applications like blockchains, biological networks, social networks, and federated learning.

TextBooks:Papers from established conferences like Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), Symposium on Distributed Algorithms (SODA), Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), and International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), along with a host of concomitant journals.

ReferenceBooks:1. Nancy A. Lynch. 1996. Distributed Algorithms. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA. 2. Hagit Attiya and Jennifer Welch. 2004. Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, USA. 3. Christian Cachin, Rachid Guerraoui, and Lus Rodrigues. 2011. Introduction to Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming, (2nd. ed.). Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated. 4. Paola Flocchini, Giuseppe Prencipe, Nicola Santoro. 2019. Distributed Computing by Mobile Entities, Current Research in Moving and Computing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 11340, Springer. 5. Roger Wattenhofer. 2016. The Science of the Blockchain (1st. ed.). CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, North Charleston, SC, USA. 6. Elaine Shi. Foundations of Distributed Consensus and Blockchains. Preliminary textbook draft available at https://www.distributedconsensus.net/.

Prerequisite:CS6851