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Why Transparency, Scalability, Dependability, Performance and Flexibility Are Challenging in A Distributed System?

The document discusses how achieving transparency, scalability, dependability, performance, and flexibility can be challenging in distributed systems. Transparency is difficult due to limitations of communication speeds and the tradeoff with other goals. Scalability is challenging to maintain as the system grows due to issues like controlling costs and bottlenecks. Dependability is difficult because all components must work properly as data is fragmented across the system. Performance faces hurdles from communication delays, faults, and lack of global synchronization. Flexibility conflicts with other goals like transparency and makes properties like extensibility challenging to achieve.

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SimantaKasaju
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93 views

Why Transparency, Scalability, Dependability, Performance and Flexibility Are Challenging in A Distributed System?

The document discusses how achieving transparency, scalability, dependability, performance, and flexibility can be challenging in distributed systems. Transparency is difficult due to limitations of communication speeds and the tradeoff with other goals. Scalability is challenging to maintain as the system grows due to issues like controlling costs and bottlenecks. Dependability is difficult because all components must work properly as data is fragmented across the system. Performance faces hurdles from communication delays, faults, and lack of global synchronization. Flexibility conflicts with other goals like transparency and makes properties like extensibility challenging to achieve.

Uploaded by

SimantaKasaju
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Why Transparency, Scalability, Dependability, Performance

and Flexibility are challenging in a distributed system?


A distributed system is a collection of independent computers that appear to the users of the
system as a single computer. Generally distributed system is “A collection of logically related
data that is distributed over different processing nodes of computer network.” The main
objectives of the distributed system are
 Transparency
 Scalability
 Dependability
 Performance
 Flexibility.
Though all the terms that are mentioned above are the basic objectives of Distributed system
but sometimes it is really challenging to achieve it.

Transparency as a challenge
The system should appear as a single unit and the interactions and complexity between the
components should be hidden from the end user. Distributed system designers must hide
the complexity of the system as much as they can. Sometimes it is unusual for the
distributed system for having transparency.
 Transparency is often deemed critical to enable effective real-world deployment of
intelligent systems.
 Yet the motivations for and benefits of different types of transparency can vary
significantly depending on context, and objective measurement criteria are difficult
to identify.
 Is not always possible because of natural limitations on how fast communication
take place in WAN.
 Complete transparency is not always desirable due to the trade-offs with
performance and scalability as well as the problems that can be caused while
confusing local and remote operations.

Scalability as a challenge
“As the system, number of resources, or users increase the performance of the system is
not lost and remains effective in accomplishing its goals”
 Controlling the cost of physical resources: Cost should linearly increase with the
system size.
 Controlling the performance loss: For example, in hierarchically structured data,
search performance loss due to data growth should not be beyond O(log n), where n
is the size of data.
 Avoiding performance bottlenecks: Using decentralized algorithms to avoid having
performance bottlenecks.
 Size: Number of users and resources to be processed. Problem associated is
overloading
 Geography: Distance between users and resources. Problem associated is
communication reliability or greater communication delays and the potential for
communication failure.
 Administration: As the size of distributed systems increases, many of the system
needs to be controlled. Problem associated is administrative mess

Dependability as a challenge

Property of a technological solution that it may be depended upon under a wide range of
circumstances is called dependability. It involves Reliability,Availability,Security and safety.
 Although distributed systems provide the potential for higher availability due to
replication, the distributed nature of services means that more components have to
work properly for a single service to function.
 But for dependability, all the systems should work jointly (dependent with each
other) only when the data are fragmented and distributed.
 In this situation, the dependability requires: Consistency, Security, Concurrency
control and Fault tolerance.Which are very difficult to achieve.

Performance as a challenge
Performance evaluation is an integral part of any distributed software system which gives an indication
of whether the system will meet non-functional properties, once system built.
 With the rapid growth of parallel and distributed processing in modern computers a high
demand for performance improvement and low cost productivity in real life is desired.
 Moreover challenges like communication fault delay or computation fault delay may occur
because of network failure or machine failure respectively.
 Making fault tolerant DS is a tough job. The ability to tolerate the fault and functioning
normally is required by DS.
 Synchronization is another important aspect in DS because Distributed System do not have a
global clock. It is required that synchronization be done as per the actual real time.
 In the case of distributed systems this is a particularly interesting challenge, since it directly
conflicts with some other desirable properties like Transparency, Security, Dependability
Scalability can easily be harmful to performance.

Flexibility as a Challenge
It is important that the system be flexible because we are just beginning to learn about how
to build distributed systems. It is likely that this process will incur many false starts and
considerable backtracking.

 A flexible distributed system can be configured to provide exactly the services that a user or
programmer needs.
 But for that kind of flexibility a system should have the number of key properties.
Extensibility ,Openness ,Interoperability Which is very difficult to achieve because it
contradicts with the other desirable properties as well

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