Distributed Systems and Algorithms

CS 442 is about reasoning rigorously over systems where there is no shared clock, no shared memory, and any node can fail — so "correctness" has to be argued through invariants and orderings rather than intuition. You will prove safety and progress properties of small protocols, work through the classical algorithms (logical and vector clocks, snapshots, mutual exclusion, leader election, consensus), and build something hands-on with RPC, MPI, or a key/value-style store in the project. It sits downstream of operating systems and algorithms, and is the course that makes later work on cloud infrastructure, databases, and large-scale systems actually make sense.