Lecture 6
The topic of this lesson is coordination and agreement, two topics of great interest in distributed systems. Coordinating a group of processes (and making them agree on some value) requires that we are able to pass messages to those processes in an efficient and perhaps also reliable way. For this reason, we will also discuss multicast operations as well as message ordering -- topics of great interest not only for the theoretical but also the practical part of the course.
The outline for the lecture is as follows:
- Distributed mutual exclusion
- Elections
- Mulicast communication
- Consensus and related problems (in particular the Byzantine generals problem)
No lecture notes this time!
Reading
Intensive reading: 12.1 - 12.5
Extensive reading: 4.5
Exercises
Primary set: 12.1, 12.3 - 12.7, 12.9, 12.11 - 12.15, 12.17, 12.18
Secondary set: 12.8, 12.10, 12.16, 12.19 - 12.21