The course discusses the following distributed systems topics: Design goals: transparency, openness, scalability. Communication: remote procedure call, remote object invocation, message-oriented communication. Processes: threads, clients, servers, code migration, software agents. Naming. Synchronization. Consistency&Replication. Fault tolerance. Security. Distributed object-based systems: CORBA, distributed COM, Globe. Distributed coordination-based systems: TIB/Rendezvous, JINI.

For more information see AUC description of Distributed Systems.