Distributed Systems Education: From Traditional Models to New Paths of Learning

Distributed systems underpin our digital economy and thus the modern world. By operating as enormous yet largely autonomous ecosystems of complex technologies, these systems already store and process a majority of the (big) data produced by our industry and our society, and host the global cloud market. Teaching and researching distributed systems must enable the next "killer applications" of the next-generation systems: to cope with the new applications (multimedia, satellite images, government, health, critical infrastructure) expected to represent over 80% of the overall Internet traffic by 2020, enabling much more distributed and heterogeneous infrastructure elements (e.g., clouds combined with fog and edge computing, pervasive system, ubiquitous and mobile computing). This extended abstract is focused on presenting the main ideas about teaching distributed system for undergraduate, master and PhD students, starting from achievements obtained by Computer Science and Engineering Department of University Politehnica of Bucharest (UPB) and considering success collaborations with VU Amsterdam, different universities from Europe and USA and other research institutes (e.g. Cern, INRIA).