Networks and Distributed Systems (2008 - 2009: David Cheriton oral)

Principles of computer communication and networks as covered by CS 144 (See CS144 course material and associated readings), including:

• Transport level issues, techniques and protocols such as session management, naming, error control, flow control, transport-level implementation.
• Local networks, wide-area networks and internetworking including bus networks, rings, packet radio, satellite, routing, congestion control, etc.
• Rouing protocols
• Basic knowledge of physical, data link and application levels.

Concepts, principles and examples of distributed systems as covered by CS244B including: (Cheriton's CS 244B course reader is a good source.)

• Network interprocess communication, RPC.
• Naming and authentication techniques.
• Agreement, negotiation and synchronization protocols.
• Presentations issues, file access, I/O interfaces.
• Distributed execution, scheduling, process migration, fault-tolerance and some knowledge of distributed systems security.

Stanford CS Qualifying Exam in Networks and Distributed Systems Reading List

Texts:

1. Kurose and Ross, Computer Networks: A Top-down Approach. Prentice-Hall, 4th edition
2. Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg, "Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design." Addison Wesley, 3rd edition, 2000.

Papers:

1. J. H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D. D. Clark, "End-to-End Arguments in System Design, " ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 2, no. 4, November 1984, pp. 277-288.
2. J. Dean and S. Ghemawat, "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters" OSDI'04, Dec. 2004.
3. M. Alguilera et al. Sinfonia: A New Paradigm for building Scalable Distributed Systems, SOSP 2007.
4. G. DeCandia et al., Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-Value Store, SOSP 2007
5. Luiz Barroso et al., "Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture." IEEE Micro, 2003.
6. S. M. Bellovin and M. Merritt, "Limitations of the Kerberos Protocol." Computer Comm. Review, vol. 20, no. 5, October 1990.
7. Mike Burrows, "The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Couplted Distributed Systems." OSDI 2006.
8. David Cheriton and Dale Skeen, "Understanding the Limitations of Causally and Totally Ordered Communication." Proceedings of the 14th SOSP, December 1993.
9. A. Fox et al., "Cluster-Based Scalable Network Services." Proceedings of the 16th SOSP, 1997.
10. C. Gray and D. Cheriton, "Leases: An Efficient Fault-Tolerant Mechanism for Distributed File Cache Consistency." Proceedings of the 12th SOSP, December 1989.
11. M. Handley, "Why the Internet only Just Works." BT Technology Journal, Vol 24, No. 3, 2006.
12. V. Jacobson, "Congestion Avoidance and Control" Proc. ACM SIGCOMM '88, Aug. 1988, pp. 314-329.
13. J. Kistler and M. Satyanarayanan, "Disconnected Operation in the Coda File System," ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 10, vol. 1 (Feb. 1992), pp 3-25.
14. John Kohl, B. Clifford Neuman, and Theodore Ts'o, "The Evolution of the Kerberos Authentication Service." EurOpen Conference Proceedings, Norway, May 1991.
15. Butler Lampson, Martin Abadi, Michael Burrows, and Edward Wobber, "Authentication in Distributed Systems: Theory and Practice." Proceedings of the 13th SOSP, October 1991
16. David L. Mills, "Internet Time Synchronization: the Network Time Protocol." IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 39, no. 10, Oct. 1991.
17. J. Ousterhout et al., "The Sprite Network Operating System." IEEE Computer, February 1988.
18. R. Pike et al., "Plan 9 from Bell Labs." Proceedings of the UK Unix Users Group Summer 1990 Conference, London, 1990.
19. Russel Sandberg et al., "Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem." Proceedings of the Summer 1985 USENIX Conference, June 1985.
20. M. Schroeder, A. Birrell, and R. Needham, "Experience with Grapevine: The Growth of a Distributed System," ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 2, no. 1 (February 1984), pp 3-23.