Yes! I’m finally registered for the distributed computing course. This course is hot off the press! It’s spanking brand new to the OMSCS program and offered for the first time this (Spring 2021) term. I’ve been eagerly waiting over two years for a course centering around distributed systems, combining both theory and practice.
The course is taught by professor Ada, who also teaches Graduate Introduction to Operating Systems, which received the highest accolades from previous students who wrote reviews over at OMSCentral review. I bet this class will raise the bar, intellectually challenging and stimulating our minds. According to the course’s syllabus, we’ll bridge both theory and practice by delivering 5 programming projects, the assignments based on University of Washington’s Distributed Systems Labs that are published in this repository: https://github.com/emichael/dslabs . The projects will require us students to:
- Build a simple ping/pong protocol
- Implement an exactly-once RPC protocol (parts of lab 1 reused)
- Design and implement a primary-backup protocol to teach fault-tolerance
- Implement the famous Paxos
- Implement a key value stored using Paxos and implement a two-phased commit protocol
I’m particularly interested in the last two projects: paxos and two-phased commit protocol. I had first read the original Paxos paper about four years ago, when I first joined Amazon, but never implemented Paxos myself; and I only recently learned about two-phased commit protocols a month or two ago when taking advanced operating systems last semester and it’s a topic I want to understand more deeply.
I’m hoping that during (and after I take this class) I’ll be able to apply the principles of distributed computing to effectively analyze the reliability of existing and new services powering Amazon Web Services. Moreover, I’ll incorporate the lessons learned into my mental model and refer to them as I both design and build new systems
Let’s get cracking.