Sukumar Ghosh has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA since 1995. He earned his Ph.D in computer science and engineering from Calcutta University, India in 1971, and completed his postdoctoral research at the University of Dortmund, Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellow. His current research interests are in distributed systems, with a special emphasis on dynamic distributed systems; fault-tolerant, self-stabilizing, and autonomic distributed systems; and peer-to-peer networks. He has published over 100 research papers and 5 book chapters on these topics, and has supervised 16 Ph.D students.

Section I: Background Materials. Introduction. Interprocess Communication: An Overview. Section II: Foundational Topics. Models for Communication. Representing Distributed Algorithms: Syntax and Semantics. Program Correctness. Time in a Distributed System. Section III: Important Paradigms. Mutual Exclusion. Distributed Snapshot. Global State Collection. Graph Algorithms. Coordination Algorithms. Section IV: Faults and Fault-Tolerant Systems. Fault-Tolerant Systems. Distributed Consensus. Distributed Transactions. Group Communication. Replicated Data Management. Self-Stabilizing Systems. Section V: Real-World Issues. Distributed Discrete-Event Simulation. Security in Distributed Systems. Sensor Networks. Social and Peer-to-Peer Networks.