Well, I took a couple of courses at UT which dealt with "practical" distributed systems. The first was more on the lines of here is a large dataset, how do we d

Well, I took a couple of courses at UT which dealt with "practical" distributed systems. The first was more on the lines of here is a large dataset, how do we design a distributed system that handles it. There, we learn about principles/paradigms such as MPI, threading, CUDA to address these issues. I took another course that was basically only Hadoop. Both are good. It completely depends on what the outcome of your course is: If you are looking for someone who just needs a flavor of what it means to think at that scale, generating an EC2 cluster and working on a few Map Reduce problems should be fine. If you are looking more to inculcate general principles of how to think at scale, the former should be good.