Lecture 1: Introduction

This podcast episode serves as an introductory lecture for the distributed systems course 6824. The speaker defines distributed systems, highlighting their importance in critical infrastructure and the reasons for their development, such as high performance, fault tolerance, spatial distribution, and security. The lecture also covers the challenges in distributed systems, including concurrency, unexpected failure patterns, and performance bottlenecks. The speaker outlines the course structure, including lectures, papers, exams, labs, and an optional final project, and then discusses key topics like implementation, performance (scalability), fault tolerance (availability and recoverability), and consistency, using MapReduce as a detailed case study to illustrate these concepts.