- This 3-credit course provides a comprehensive study of distributed systems, emphasizing the principles, architectures, and technologies that enable multiple interconnected computers to operate as a unified system. Starting with foundational concepts, students explore distributed versus decentralized systems, design objectives, and classification challenges. The course examines architectural styles including layered, middleware-based, symmetric, and hybrid models, alongside process and thread management in distributed environments.

Key infrastructure topics such as virtualization, virtual machines, and containerization are covered for their role in optimizing computing power and resource management. Students study core communication paradigms like message-oriented communication and remote procedure calls, and advanced synchronization techniques including clock synchronization, mutual exclusion, and election algorithms.

The curriculum further investigates gossip protocols, event-based coordination, naming schemes, consistency models, replica management, and fault tolerance. Topics on distributed transactions, commit protocols, recovery, and security—covering cryptography, authentication, authorization, trust, and monitoring—prepare students to build resilient, secure, and scalable systems.

By integrating theoretical foundations with practical applications, this course equips learners to design and manage modern distributed systems that underpin cloud computing, edge computing, and large-scale data platforms.