6.5840 Schedule: Spring 2026

feb 2
First day of classes feb 3
LEC 1 (rtm): Introduction
Preparation: Read MapReduce (2004)
Assigned: Lab 1: MapReduce feb 4 feb 5
LEC 2 (fk): RPC and Threads, crawler.go, kv.go, vote examples
Preparation: Do Online Go tutorial (FAQ) (Question) feb 6 feb 9 feb 10
LEC 3 (fk): GFS
Preparation: Read GFS (2003) (FAQ) (Question)
Assigned: Lab 2: Key/Value server feb 11 feb 12
LEC 4 (rtm): Paxos pseudo-code FAQ
Preparation: Read Paxos (Question) feb 13
DUE: Lab 1. All labs are due at 11:59pm. feb 16
President's day feb 17
Assigned: Lab 3: Raft
Monday schedule feb 18 feb 19
LEC 5 (guest lecture): (Russ Cox of Google/Go) Go patterns
Preparation: Read The Go Programming Language and Environment (FAQ) (Question) feb 20
DUE: Lab 2 feb 23 feb 24
Snow day, no lecture feb 25 feb 26
LEC 6 (fk): Fault Tolerance: Raft (1)
Preparation: Read Raft (extended) (2014), to end of Section 5 (FAQ) (Question) feb 27
DUE: Lab 3A mar 2 mar 3
LEC 7 (fk): Fault Tolerance: Raft (2)
Preparation: Read Raft (extended) (2014), Section 7 to end (but not Section 6) (FAQ) (Question)
Assigned: Final Project mar 4 mar 5
LEC 8 (rtm): Consistency and Linearizability
Preparation: Linearizability (only through Section 3.1) (FAQ) (Question) mar 6
DUE: Lab 3B
ADD DATE mar 9 mar 10
LEC 9 (fk): Zookeeper
Preparation: Read ZooKeeper (2010) (FAQ) (Question)
Assigned: Lab 4: KV Raft mar 11 mar 12
LEC 10 (fk): Q&A Lab 3A+B
Preparation: (Question) mar 13
DUE: Lab 3C mar 16 mar 17
LEC 11 (rtm): Distributed Transactions
Preparation: Read 6.033 Chapter 9, just 9.1.5, 9.1.6, 9.5.2, 9.5.3, 9.6.3 (FAQ) (Question) mar 18 mar 19
Mid-term Exam, Walker (50-340), 1:00 to 2:30
Materials: Open book, notes, laptop.
Scope: Lectures 1 through 11, Labs 1, 2, and 3A-C
Old Exams mar 20
DUE: Project proposals (if you are doing a project) mar 23
Spring break mar 24
Spring break mar 25
Spring break mar 26
Spring break mar 27
Spring break mar 30 mar 31
LEC 12 (rtm): Spanner
Preparation: Read Spanner (2012) (FAQ) (Question) apr 1 apr 2
LEC 13 (fk): Chain Replication
Preparation: Read CR (2004) (FAQ) (Question) apr 3
DUE: Lab 3D apr 6 apr 7
LEC 14 (fk): Optimistic Concurrency Control
Preparation: Read FaRM (2015) (FAQ) (Question)
Assigned: Lab 5: Sharded KV apr 8 apr 9
LEC 15 (Upamanyu Sharma): Verification of distributed systems
Preparation: Read IronFleet (2015) (Question) apr 10
DUE: Lab 4A apr 13 apr 14
Hacking day, no lecture apr 15 apr 16
LEC 16 (rtm): Cache Consistency: Memcached at Facebook
Preparation: Read Memcached at Facebook (2013) (FAQ) (Question) apr 17
DUE: Lab 4B+C apr 20
Patriot's day apr 21
LEC 17 (Marc Brooker, on zoom): AWS Lambda
Preparation: Read On-demand Container Loading (2023) (Question)
DROP DATE apr 22 apr 23
LEC 18 (fk): Ray
Preparation: Read Ray (2021) (FAQ) (Question) apr 24 apr 27 apr 28
LEC 19 (rtm): Fork Consistency, SUNDR
Preparation: Read SUNDR (2004) (through the end of Section 3.3.2) (FAQ) (Question) apr 29
DUE: Lab 5A apr 30
LEC 20 (rtm): Peer-to-peer: Bitcoin
Preparation: Read Bitcoin (2008), and summary (FAQ) (Question) may 1 may 4 may 5
Hacking day, no lecture may 6 may 7
LEC 21 (Derek Leung): Byzantine Fault Tolerance, slides
Preparation: Read Practical BFT (1999) (FAQ) (Question) may 8
DUE: Lab 5B+C+D
DUE: Project reports and code may 11 may 12
LEC 22: Project demos
Last day of classes may 13 may 14 may 15
Final exam period. may 18
Final exam period. may 19
Final exam period. may 20
Final exam period. may 21 may 22