Sharding

Muddy Foreheads

Failure models

Remote Procedure Call (RPC)

Transition Systems

Primary/backup

Distributed Transition Systems

Virtual Clocks

Paxos

MultiPaxos

Leases

Consistency Models

Vector Clocks

Snapshots

Two-phase commit

Microservices

Bigtable

Google File System (GFS)

Spanner

Bayou

Dynamo

IronFleet

Tapir

CSE 452 Distributed Systems University of Washington Winter 2022 This senior-level course offers deep insights into the construction of distributed systems like client-server computing, web, cloud computing, and peer-to-peer systems. Major topics include remote procedure call, error management, and consistency of distributed state. Noted for its intellectually challenging and career-relevant approach. Distributed systems are central to many aspects of how computers are used, from web applications to e-commerce to content distribution. This senior-level course will cover abstractions and implementation techniques for the construction of distributed systems, including client-server computing, the web, cloud computing, peer-to-peer systems, and distributed storage systems. Topics will include remote procedure call, preventing and finding errors in distributed programs, maintaining consistency of distributed state, fault tolerance, high availability, and scaling.

Alumni of this course say that it is among the most intellectually challenging courses that they have taken at UW, and among the most relevant to their future careers. We will attempt to live up to that recommendation. We believe the best way to learn the material is to implement the ideas presented in the course, and so there is a substantial programming project.

The [calendar page](https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/22wi/schedule) provides a detailed topic list for the course, including readings, problem sets, and labs. In addition, we are using Gitlab, Ed, and Gradescope for various parts of the course.   

CSE 452 Distributed Systems

Parallelism and Distributed Systems

Cryptographic primitives

Nakamoto consensus

P2P Network

Bitcoin system

Bitcoin safety

Bitcoin liveness

Scaling throughput

Scaling latency

Proof of stake

Side Blockchains

Payment Channels

Rollups

Streamlet and Hotstuff

Algorand

BFT protocols

Longest Chain Protocols

Bootstrapping blockchains

Zcash architecture

Privacy bridge

Fair transaction ordering

MEV and PBS architecture

Principles of Blockchains Princeton University Fall 2022 This course by Princeton University provides a full-stack design overview of blockchains, focusing on Bitcoin's design, scaling strategies, and additional considerations such as privacy and finality. It features a practical approach, with students implementing a Bitcoin client in Rust by the end of the course. Blockchains are decentralized digital trust engines and are a potential replacement to “digital platforms” that we encounter in today’s world. Digital platform companies occupy 7 of the largest companies in the world based on market capitalization (eg: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent). Blockchains came into prominence through Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, introduced in 2009. In the decade since its inception, blockchain designs have evolved significantly, although the corresponding evolution of applications (beyond cryptocurrencies) have not caught up yet. In this course, we study a full-stack design of blockchains: we view the blockchains as a whole integrated system involving networking, incentives, consensus, application layer support. The course covers the foundations of blockchains, and is divided into 3 parts: in the first part we study the Bitcoin design in detail. Although very secure and remarkably incentive compatible in the real world, Bitcoin has very poor performance in many ways: throughput, latency, energy, compute, storage and communication. In the second part we study the various efforts to scale the performance of Bitcoin in all the different dimensions, while maintaining the incentive compatibility and security of Bitcoin. In the final part, we study aspects of blockchain design that were simply not considered in Bitcoin (e.g., privacy, finality). In the spirit of Nakamoto (who implemented and tested the Bitcoin client before writing the white paper), this course will be implementation-heavy. We will use the Rust programming language for our assignments and projects for the foundation component of the course. By the end of the course, you will implement a Bitcoin client in Rust.   The basic technical prerequisites are a background in probability and algorithms. Decent amount of software programming background is essential.  Supplemental reading:
- Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, A. Narayanan, J. Bonneau, E. Felten, A. Miller and S. Goldfeder, Princeton University Press. Henceforth termed as PUP (Princeton university press).
- [Introduction to Cryptocurrencies](https://nakamoto.com/introduction-to-cryptocurrency/), a basic online course by Haseeb Qureshi.

Principles of Blockchains

Blockchain

Shard (database architecture)

Sharding

2 courses cover this concept

CSE 452 Distributed Systems

Principles of Blockchains