Principles of Distributed Computing (lecture collection)

Distributed computing is essential in modern computing and communications systems. Examples are on the one hand large-scale networks such as the Internet, and on the other hand multiprocessors such as your new multi-core laptop. The lecture notes on this webpage introduce the principles of distributed computing, emphasizing the fundamental issues underlying the design of distributed systems and networks: communication, coordination, fault-tolerance, locality, parallelism, self-organization, symmetry breaking, synchronization, uncertainty. We explore essential algorithmic ideas and lower bound techniques, basically the "pearls" of distributed computing. Each chapter covers a fresh topic.

Note that the order of the chapters is more or less arbitrary. Each chapter is mostly independent, with the occasional reference to another chapter.