14-736 Distributed Systems: Techniques, Infrastructure, and Services

12 units, Carnegie Mellon University

This course explores both foundational and contemporary topics in distributed systems, such as communication, coordinating time, synchronization, consensus, impossibility of agreement, replica management, file systems, distributed SQL and noSQL databases, CAP, ACID, BASE, distributed hashing, anonymous communication, models of computation, and higher-level tools. The course project work focuses on the implementation of scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems.

Prerequisites: 15-513 (min C) or 18-600 (min C)

Offered: Spring 2027, Spring 2026

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