Course development
ID2203 Distributed Systems, Advanced Course 7.5 credits
On this page, you can track the course's development over time. Once the course analysis is published, data for each course offering is displayed, including the number of registered students, course results, and planned improvements for the next session. All course syllabuses and course memos are shown on the page Archive.
The information can help prospective, current, and former students with course selection, or to follow up on their own participation. Teachers, course coordinators, examiners, program directors, and others can use the page as a resource for course development.
2025
Spring 2025-60648 ( Start date 14 Jan 2025, English )
Changes planned for the next course offering
In the future, we plan to focus on the project that has received the most criticism. We will keep involving MS students as TAs in the project as the course scales to more students, since we made a pilot in 2025 and worked out well. This also incentivizes MSc students to perform their best and be involved of the next course iterations. Among planned changes we think that we have to be more careful with what skeleton code we provide to the students. Some projects this year provided too much and this made some teams focus on irrelevant parts of the project while failing the critical parts. We will still encourage the use of the Rust language, given that we provide software built in Rust such as the KTH-origin open source OmniPaxos framework. Non-grade quizzes on the last chapters of the course will also be introduced to help students grasp some of the advanced topics better. Finally, we will attempt a guest industry lecture too in the course next year from Google, Databricks, Meta, Cockroach DB etc.
Coordinator
Paris CarboneExaminers
Paris CarboneStudents
34Course syllabus
Course syllabus ID2203 ( Spring 2019 - )Course memo
No course memo addedCompulsory within programme
No information insertedResults on course
Total number
17
A
10
B
5
C
2
D
0
E
0
FX
0
F
0
2024
Spring 2024-60695 ( Start date 16 Jan 2024, English )
Changes planned for the next course offering
No information inserted
Coordinator
Paris CarboneExaminers
Paris CarboneStudents
52*Course syllabus
Course syllabus ID2203 ( Spring 2019 - )Course memo
No course memo addedCompulsory within programme
No information insertedCourse analysis
Course analysis ID2203: 1 Oct 2024Changes introduced for this course offering
New updated plan with better support for group projects, more variety of topics and revised depth and insights in lectures on Eventual Consistency, CRDTs, Distributed Transactions and Distributed Clock Synchronization (Atomic, Quantum Clocks). Emphasis was put in analysis of existing systems and solutions such as Google Spanner, and trade-offs when it comes to liveness and performance properties.Course data has been registered manually
Examination grade
77.1%
2023
Doktorand ( Start date 17 Jan 2023, English ) , Spring 2023-60490 ( Start date 17 Jan 2023, English )
Changes planned for the next course offering
No information inserted
Coordinator
Paris CarboneExaminers
Paris CarboneStudents
31Course syllabus
Course syllabus ID2203 ( Spring 2019 - )Course memo
No course memo addedNo course memo addedCompulsory within programme
No information insertedCourse analysis
Course analysis ID2203: 1 Oct 2024Changes introduced for this course offering
The course in 2023 featured a mix of more practical projects in addition to theoretical using TLA+ and other model checking tools. In addition, we added a new updated lecture on Distributed Transactions that allowed students to understand the relation between linearizability (Distributed Systems) and strong serializability (Databases). This year we had roughly 8-10 doctoral students also joining the course which we tried as a pilot phase for FID3011 with many successful results such as encouraging doctors to conduct research papers in the field and contribute to the discussions of the course. The paper exam was also introduced in a pilot mode with mixed results as it featured primarily multiple answer questions and not so much reasoning. We therefore decided to have more reasoning-driven assessments in the next iterationCourse data has been registered manually
Examination grade
78%*
2022
Spring 2022-60313 ( Start date 18 Jan 2022, English )
Changes planned for the next course offering
No information inserted
Coordinator
Paris CarboneExaminers
Paris CarboneStudents
34Course syllabus
Course syllabus ID2203 ( Spring 2019 - )Course memo
No course memo addedCompulsory within programme
No information insertedCourse analysis
Course analysis ID2203: 25 Sept 2023Changes introduced for this course offering
In 2022 the course was actively re-developed to incorporate the needs that we identified in the 2021 version of the course. While the course objectives remained the same this year, most effort was put into making the course address and assess these objectives more reliably. To that end, the most important changes include 1) a remake of all lectures of the course and presentations with richer context, relating all concepts to real problems and systems, 2) A brand new full chapter on scalable data management which includes the important topic of distributed transactions (e.g., two-phase commit), as well as advanced topics in real-time, atomic time, and the future applications of quantum clocks and their properties. This also includes a closer examination of the Google Spanner framework which puts into perspective all advanced topics in the course such as Distributed Consensus, Atomic Clocks, Linearizable Registers, Snapshotting, and Atomic Commitment for Strict Serializability. 3) A wider range of project topics, programming languages of choice, and the choice of student-proposed projects, 4) New labs with rich content on practical consensus, liveness, and leader election as well as a deeper look into TLA+ and model checking. 5) A richer exam that despite being online provided a more accurate assessment through integrated grading criteria, multiple choices, and questions in little time which encouraged “proof of work” and discouraged students to seek answers elsewhere due to the time restrictions. In its current form, the ID2203 is a first-of-a-kind worldwide that adequately covers all these deep topics in a single course.Course data has been registered manually
Examination grade
79%*
2021
Spring 2021-60720 ( Start date 18 Jan 2021, English )
Changes planned for the next course offering
No information inserted
Coordinator
Paris CarboneExaminers
Paris CarboneStudents
42*Course syllabus
Course syllabus ID2203 ( Spring 2019 - )Course memo
No course memo addedCompulsory within programme
No information insertedCourse analysis
Course analysis ID2203: 25 Sept 2023Changes introduced for this course offering
This year the course changed the responsible, teacher, and examiner to Paris Carbone. The course had several important updates including enhanced visual examples, a new course project structure, the addition of automated model checking and tools (i.e., TLA+), new use-case analyses on distributed systems used at Google etc. and a new final chapter on distributed data management with a focus on distributed data processing. This year we also had to adapt to the COVID19 pandemic restrictions and compensate for the lack of physical interaction, the limited teaching environments, and focus on web-based evaluation.Course data has been registered manually
Examination grade
90%*