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 ====== Education ======
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 The lab is teaching the following courses:
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+  * [[education/ca_2025|Concurrent Computing (CS-453)]] (theory & practice)
+  * [[education/da_2025|Distributed Algorithms (CS-451)]] (theory & practice)
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-  * [[education/ca_2018|Concurrent Algorithms]]
+The lab taught in the past the following courses:
-  * [[education/da|Distributed Algorithms]]
   * <html><a href="http://moodle.epfl.ch/course/view.php?id=14044">Information, Calcul et Communication</a></html>
   * <html><a href="http://cowww.epfl.ch/proginfo/wwwhiver/">Introduction à la Programmation Orientée Objet</a></html>
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 DCL offers master projects in the following areas:
-  * **Probabilistic Byzantine Resilience**:  Development of high-performance, Byzantine-resilient distributed systems with provable probabilistic guarantees. Two options are currently available, both building on previous work on probabilistic Byzantine broadcast: (i) a theoretical project, focused the correctness of probabilistic Byzantine-tolerant distributed algorithms; (ii) a practical project, focused on numerically evaluating of our theoretical results. Please contact [[matteo.monti@epfl.ch|Matteo Monti]] to get more information.
+  * **[[cryptocurrencies|Cryptocurrencies]]**: We have several project openings as part of our ongoing research on designing new cryptocurrency systems. Please contact [[rachid.guerraoui@epfl.ch|Prof. Rachid Guerraoui]].
-  * **Dynamically Distributed Spatial Indexing**:  a project here would consist in studying existing spatial index data structures and algorithms, e.g., simple grids, Quadtrees, R-Trees etc., and how they may be dynamically distributed for indexing a large number of moving objects; please contact [[mailto:benoit.garbinato@unil.ch|Benoit Garbinato]] to get more information.
+  * **Scalable Distributed Cache Coherency**: The distributed cache coherency problem is a critical challenge in modern computing systems, especially as cloud platforms, large-scale web services, and in-memory data grids become increasingly central to industry. In distributed systems, ensuring that all nodes have a consistent view of shared data, even when copies are cached locally, is essential for correctness and reliability. Without coherent caches, stale reads can lead to data races, inconsistency, and subtle bugs—issues that can severely impact services like Amazon DynamoDB, Google Spanner, or Meta’s TAO graph store, where distributed caching is used at massive scale. Companies like Google and Microsoft invest heavily in research and infrastructure (e.g., Tardis, Azure Service Fabric) to implement scalable, low-latency cache coherence protocols across thousands of machines. Efficient distributed cache coherence not only improves performance and availability but also enables stronger consistency guarantees in systems that underpin everything from real-time recommendations to financial transactions. As systems grow more distributed and memory-centric, solving this problem becomes foundational to scaling modern software infrastructures. However, current distributed cache coherency protocols suffer from excessive communication overhead, limiting scalability. The question is how to offset such an overhead while maintaining the overall protocol's performance. If interested, contact [[https://people.epfl.ch/beatrice.shokry|Beatrice Shokry]].
-  * **Multicore computing**: a project here would consist for instance in designing and implementing efficient lock-based or lock-free shared objects; please contact [[https://people.epfl.ch/igor.zablotchi|Igor Zablotchi]] to get more information.
-  * **Distributed computing using RDMA and/or NVRAM**: contact [[https://people.epfl.ch/igor.zablotchi|Igor Zablotchi]] for more information.
-  * **[[Distributed ML|Distributed Machine Learning]]**
+  * **Designing and Evaluating Efficient Concurrent Algorithms:** Multiprocessor computations are fundamental to modern computing, with concurrent data structures serving as their core building blocks. Despite the extensive study of concurrent algorithms, many key challenges remain unsolved. The project focuses on designing efficient concurrent data structures to address problems that have gained attention in recent years but still lack efficient solutions. The student will design solutions that ensure correctness (linearizability), implement them and benchmark their performance against existing approaches. This will provide hands-on experience in both the theory and practice of concurrent algorithms, letting the student explore the intricate balance between concurrency, performance and correctness in real-world applications. For more information, contact [[https://people.epfl.ch/gal.sela|Gal Sela]].
-  * **Distributed and Fault-tolerant algorithms**: projects here would consist in designing failure detection mechanisms suited for large-scale systems, real-time systems, and systems with unreliable communication or partial synchrony. This task also involves implementing, evaluating, and simulating the performance of the developed mechanisms to verify the achievable guarantees; please contact [[http://people.epfl.ch/david.kozhaya|David Kozhaya]] to get more information.
+  * **Accelerating Safe ML Systems:** ML has been a hot topic for so long. Now with LLMs, it is getting even more attractive for everyone in the research community as well as industry (e.g., Google, Meta, etc.). In particular, training large models with massive data makes the need for distributed computing (i.e., distributing tasks among machines) non questionable, which leads to two main challenges. First, how to do it fast? Second, how to do it safe (e.g., secure collaborative training, robust ML, etc.)? At the heart of these two challenges is how to communicate with other machines in a fast and a secure way? This leads us to Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology which is becoming increasingly important in the field of machine learning (ML), particularly for distributed training of large models and handling massive datasets. RDMA enables high-throughput, low-latency data transfers between servers without involving the CPU, which significantly reduces the overhead associated with traditional networking methods. This is crucial for ML tasks that require rapid synchronization and communication among multiple nodes. Now the question is how to use RDMA efficiently to build fast and secure ML systems? If interested, contact [[https://people.epfl.ch/Beatrice.Shokry?lang=en|Beatrice Shokry]] for more information.
-  * **Consistency in global-scale storage systems**: We offer several projects in the context of storage systems, ranging from implementation of social applications (similar to [[http://retwis.redis.io/|Retwis]], or [[https://github.com/share/sharejs|ShareJS]]) to recommender systems, static content storage services (à la [[https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi10/tech/full_papers/Beaver.pdf|Facebook's Haystack]]), or experimenting with well-known cloud serving benchmarks (such as [[https://github.com/brianfrankcooper/YCSB|YCSB]]); please contact [[http://people.epfl.ch/dragos-adrian.seredinschi|Adrian Seredinschi]] for further information.
-  * **Distributed database algorithms**: a project here would consist in implementing and evaluating protocols that are running in today's database systems, e.g., [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-phase_commit_protocol|2PC]], and comparing them with those protocols that can  potentially be used in future database systems; please contact [[http://people.epfl.ch/jingjing.wang|Jingjing Wang]] to get more information.
+  * **Evaluating Distributed Systems**: By nature, distributed systems are hard to evaluate. Deploying real world systems and orchestrating large scale experiments require dedicated software and expensive infrastructure. As a result, many widespread distributed systems are not properly evaluated, tested on uncomparable or irreproductible setups. Projects of this category aim to build efficient and scalable evaluation tools for distributed systems. [[https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3552326.3567482|Diablo]]-related projects involve building a test harness for evaluating blockchains (skills required: network programming, blockchain, Go, C++). Another set of projects focus on creating **large networks simulators** able to emulate hundreds of powerful machines from a single physical server (skills required: system programming, virtualization, C, C++). Contact [[https://people.epfl.ch/gauthier.voron/?lang=en|Gauthier Voron]] for more information.
+  * **Smart Contracts and Decentralized Software**: Smart contracts are one of the key innovations brought by blockchains, enabling users to deploy codes that get executed transparently, autonomously and in a decentralized fashion. However, the applicability of smart contracts is hampered by their limited performance. Projects of this category aim to build runtime environments for fast and efficient execution of smart contracts. The first set of projects address the challenge of **deterministic parallelism**, or how to use several threads to execute a smart contract while guaranteeing a deterministic result (skills required: compiler principles, Rust). The second set of projects explores the concept of non-transactional smart contracts, a way to remove the notion of gas in smart contracts (skills required: system programming, C, Rust). The last set of projects focus on high-throughput cryptographic primitives: how to use hardware acceleration to speed up transaction authentication (skills required: cryptography principles, GPU programming, C, Assembly). Contact [[https://people.epfl.ch/gauthier.voron/?lang=en|Gauthier Voron]] for more information.
+  * **Safe and Scalable Consensus**: Decentralized systems like cryptocurrencies rely on the concept of consensus. This component is critical as it dictates how performant, safe and scalable a distributed system is. Over the last years, the DCL has pushed the performance of consensus algorithms to [[https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.07081|unprecedented levels]] but the practical safety and scalability are yet to be addressed. Projects of this category focus on designing and implementing distributed consensus algorithms which are safer against cyberattacks or adverse environments and work with higher number of participants. On one side, some projects explore new **consensus designs** with good theoretical guarantees and practical behaviors (skills required: distributed algorithms, network programming, Go). On the other side, some projects focus on ensuring the correctness of existing consensus algorithms through **model checking** at various levels (skills required: distributed algorithms, Rust, TLA+). Contact [[https://people.epfl.ch/gauthier.voron/?lang=en|Gauthier Voron]] for more information.
+  * **Microsecond-scale dependable systems.** Modern networking technologies such as RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) allow for sub-microsecond communication latency. Combined with emerging data center architectures, such as disaggregated resources pools, they open the door to novel blazing-fast and resource-efficient systems. Our research focuses on designing such microsecond-scale systems that can also tolerate faults. Our vision is that tolerating network asynchrony and faults (crash or Byzantine) is a must, but that it shouldn't affect the overall performance of a system. We achieve this goal by devising and implementing novel algorithms tailored for new hardware and revisiting theoretical models to better reflect modern data centers. Previous work notably encompasses microsecond-scale (BFT) replication, membership services and key-value stores (OSDI'20, ATC'22, ASPLOS'23, OSDI'24 and SOSP'24). Overall, if you are interested in making data centers faster and safer, contact [[https://people.epfl.ch/clement.burgelin|Clément Burgelin]] and [[https://people.epfl.ch/antoine.murat|Antoine Murat]] for more information.
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+\\
 ===== Semester Projects =====
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 If the subject of a Master Project interests you as a Semester Project, please contact the supervisor of the Master Project to see if it can be considered for a Semester Project.
-EPFL I&C duration, credits and workload information are available [[https://www.epfl.ch/schools/ic/education/|here]]. Don't hesitate to contact the project supervisor if you want to complete your Semester Project outside the regular semester period.
+EPFL I&C duration, credits and workload information are available on [[https://www.epfl.ch/schools/ic/education/master/semester-project-msc/|https://www.epfl.ch/schools/ic/education/master/semester-project-msc/]].