This course emphasizes on distributed computing from a system software perspective. The topics include distributed system architectures, distributed programming, message passing, remote procedure calls, group communication, naming and membership problems, logical time, consistency, fault-tolerance, and recovery. It also covers concepts and architectures for distributed processing and distributed transaction processing, process synchronization and concurrency control, quality of service, security, and various middleware (e.g. CORBA, DCE and DCOM).