Distributed Systems

ECE419, Winter 2026
University of Toronto
Instructor: Ashvin Goel

Lecture material

The lectures will provide an understanding of the fundamental concepts in distributed systems and discuss several case studies of deployed systems.

The instructor will make lecture material available here as topics are covered in class. Lecture videos will not be recorded.

Topic #	Topic and instructors slides	Additional material
1.	Introduction
	Introduction to the course	Reading: Introduction to Distributed System Design
2.	Programming distributed systems
	Threads and concurrency	Code: Hello World Code: Web Crawler
	Models of distributed systems
	Remote procedure calls	Code: RPC Reading: Implementing Remote Procedure Calls
	Time in distributed systems	Reading: Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System Reading: Clock Synchronization
	Broadcast communication	Reading: Broadcast mechanisms
3.	Highly consistent, replicated systems
	Strong data consistency	Reading: Consistency Models
	Replication
	Consensus
	Case Study 1: Consensus in Raft	Reading: In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Extended Version) Video: In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm Animation: The Secret Lives of Data
	Case Study 2: Coordination with ZooKeeper	Reading: ZooKeeper: Wait-free Coordination for Internet-scale Systems Video: ZooKeeper: Wait-free Coordination for Internet-scale Systems