Distributed Systems

What the lectures cover

This NPTEL course runs to 27 lectures and works through the classic problems of distributed computing. It starts with message-passing algorithms and leader election in rings, then moves to logical time and vector clocks, and to recording a consistent global state.

Coordination and recovery

A large part of the syllabus is about coordination: mutual exclusion with quorum-based and token-based approaches, consensus and agreement algorithms, and detecting deadlock and termination across machines. Checkpointing and rollback recovery explain how a system resumes after a failure.

Who it suits

The lecture list leans toward the algorithmic side of distributed systems rather than tooling, so it suits learners who want to understand the underlying methods before building on them.