6.5840: Distributed Computer Systems Engineering

  1. Table of Contents
A smiling raft.

We learned how to build a Raft! And implemented a sharded, fault-tolerant key value store using Raft in Go. :)

From the course catalog: Abstractions and implementation techniques for engineering distributed systems: remote procedure call, threads and locking, client/server, peer-to-peer, consistency, fault tolerance, and security. Readings from current literature. Individual laboratory assignments in Go culminate in the construction of a fault-tolerant and scalable network file system.

Course Website

Table of Contents

Since tests were open book, the “cheatsheets” are more just like table of contents, so I didn’t make a separate section for them.

  • Class 1: MapReduce
  • Go Guidance: Cheatsheet, Style, Locking, Debugging
  • Class 2: Go Tutorial, RPC, Threads
  • Lab 1: MapReduce with Go RPCs
  • Class 3: VM-FT (VMware), Primary-Backup Replication
  • Class 4: Consistency and Linearizability

  • Lab 2: Linearizable key-value store (single machine)

  • Class 5: Raft Part 1, Leader Election
  • Class 6: Common Go Patterns
  • Class 7: Raft Part 2, Log, Persistence, Snapshots
  • Raft Guidance: Raft structure and debugging

  • Lab 3A–3D: Raft leader election, log, persistence, snapshots

  • Class 8: Google File System (GFS)
  • Class 9: Zookeeper (Wait-free filesystem coordination)
  • Class 10: Two-Phase Locking, Two-Phase Commit
  • Class 11: Raft Lab 3A–B Q&A, Many vs. one thread solution
  • Class 12: Spanner (Google’s globally distributed database)

  • Midterm Cheatsheet: (basically just this table of contents)

  • Class 13: FaRM (Fast Remote Memory), RDMA (Remote DMA)
  • Class 14: Chardonnay, Epochs, Fast 2PC (eRPC, NVMe)
  • Class 15: Grove, Distributed System Verification, CSL (Concurrent Separation Logic)

  • Lab 4: Fault-tolerant key-value store using Raft

  • Class 16: Memcache at Facebook, Caching, User-facing Data
  • Class 17: Amazon DynamoDB, NoSQL Transactions
  • Class 18: AWS Lambda, FaaS (Function-as-a-Service), Docker Container Caching
  • Class 19: Ray, Ownership, Distributed Futures
  • Class 20: SUNDR (Secure Untrusted Data Repository), Fork Consistency

  • Lab 5: Sharded key-value service using RSM & Raft

  • Class 21: Bitcoin, Proof-of-work
  • Class 22: PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance), Byzantine Generals Problem
  • Class 23: Project presentations
  • Final Cheatsheet: (basically just this table of contents, again)
Last updated: 22 May 2025

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