Week 1: Introduction, Taxonomy

Lecture notes:
A taxonomy of distributed systems
Lecture slides (6 per page)
Supplemental notes:
    Google Code University, Introduction to Distributed System Design — Google Code University is no longer supported by Google but this cached introduduction to distributed system design is still relevant.
Buzzwords:
Single System Image, SISD, SIMD, MIMD, multiprocessors, multicomputers, bus, switch, interconnect, tightly vs. loosely coupled systems, distributed system, Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law, redundancy, fault tolerance, transparency, fail-stop, fail-restart, omission failure, timing failure, partition failure, Byzantine failures, single point of failure, state, replicas, cache, middleware, centralized model, client-server model, peer-to-peer model, hybrid model, processor pool model, two-tier architecture, n-tier architecture, location transparency, migration transparency, replication transparency, concurrency transparency, parallelism transparency, reliability, availability, performance, scalability.