6.5840 Schedule: Spring 2026

54-100, TR1-2:30

Here is the tentative schedule of lectures and due dates. The lecture notes and paper questions for future dates are copies from previous years, and may change.

MondayTuesday WednesdayThursday Friday
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
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
LEC 6 (fk): Fault Tolerance: Raft (1)
Preparation: Read Raft (extended) (2014), to end of Section 5 (FAQ) (Question)
feb 25 feb 26
LEC 7 (fk): Fault Tolerance: Raft (2)
Preparation: Read Raft (extended) (2014), Section 7 to end (but not Section 6) (FAQ) (Question)
feb 27
DUE: Lab 3A
mar 2 mar 3
LEC 8 (rtm): Consistency and Linearizability
Preparation: Linearizability (only through Section 3.1) (FAQ) (Question)
Assigned: Final Project
mar 4 mar 5
LEC 9 (rtm): Zookeeper
Preparation: Read ZooKeeper (2010) (FAQ) (Question)
mar 6
DUE: Lab 3B
ADD DATE
mar 9 mar 10
LEC 10 (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)
Assigned: Lab 4: KV Raft
mar 11 mar 12
LEC 11 (fk): Q&A Lab 3A+B
Preparation: (Question)
mar 13
DUE: Lab 3C
mar 16 mar 17
LEC 12 (rtm): Spanner
Preparation: Read Spanner (2012) (FAQ) (Question)
mar 18 mar 19
Mid-term Exam during class
Materials: Open book, notes, laptop.
Scope: Lectures 1 through 12, 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 13 (fk): Chain Replication
Preparation: Read CR (2004) (FAQ) (Question)
apr 1 apr 2
LEC 14 (fk): Optimistic Concurrency Control
Preparation: Read FaRM (2015) (FAQ) (Question)
apr 3
DUE: Lab 3D
apr 6 apr 7
LEC 15 (rtm): Chardonnay
Preparation: Read Chardonnay (2023) (FAQ) (Question)
Assigned: Lab 5: Sharded KV
apr 8 apr 9
LEC 16 (Upamanyu Sharma): Verification of distributed systems
Preparation: Read Grove (2023), focus on sections 1, 2, 7 (Question)
apr 10
DUE: Lab 4A
apr 13 apr 14
Hacking day, no lecture
apr 15 apr 16
LEC 17 (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 18 (Marc Brooker, on zoom): AWS Lambda
Preparation: Read On-demand Container Loading (2023) (Question)
DROP DATE
apr 22 apr 23
LEC 19 (fk): Ray
Preparation: Read Ray (2021) (FAQ) (Question)
apr 24
apr 27 apr 28
LEC 20 (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 21 (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 22 (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 23: 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

For questions or comments, email 6824-staff@lists.csail.mit.edu.

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