This course covers core concepts of concurrency control—threads, locks, transactions, and crash recovery—in the first half, then shifts to distributed systems topics like network models, clocks, replication, consensus, and fault tolerance. It lists lecture topics, objectives, prerequisites, and recommended readings for a Part IB CST Michaelmas module led by Dr. Martin Kleppmann.

• Kleppmann's 16-lecture Part IB course splits evenly: 8 lectures on concurrency control, 8 on distributed systems.
• The concurrency half moves from basic threads/locks through bakery algorithm, semaphores, monitors, and message-passing (actors, CSP) to ACID transactions, 2PL, optimistic concurrency, and crash recovery.
• The distributed half covers network/failure models, physical and logical clocks, replication and consensus (Raft, FLP impossibility, 2PC, CAP), ending with case studies on CRDTs and Google Spanner's TrueTime.
• Core texts backing the course are Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, Goetz's Java Concurrency in Practice, and Kleppmann's own Designing Data-Intensive Applications.