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UNIT I
1. What is meant distributed system?
1. We define a distributed system as a collection of autonomous computers linked by a
network, with software designed to produce an integrated computing facility.
2. A system in which hardware or software components located at networked computers
communicate and coordinate their actions only by message passing.
3. A collection of two or more independent computers which coordinate their processing
through the exchange of synchronous or asynchronous message passing.
4. A collection of independent computers that appear to the users of the system as a
single computers.
2. What are the significance of distributed system?
a. Concurrency of computers.
b. No global clock.
c. Independent failures.
3. Why we do you need distributed system?
a. Functional distribution: Computers have different functional capabilities (i.e.,
sharing of resources with specific functionalities).
b. Load distribution/balancing: Assign tasks to processors such that the overall
system performance is optimized.
c. Replication of processing power: Independent processors working on the same
task.
d. Distributed system consisting of collections of microcomputers may have
processing powers that no supercomputer will ever achieve.
e. Physical separation: Systems that rely on the fact that computers are physically
separated (e.g., to satisfy reliability requirements).
f. Economics: Collections of microprocessors offer a better price/performance ratio
than large mainframes.mainframes:10 times faster, 1000 times as expensive.
4. Examples of distributed system?
a. Internet
b. Intranet
c. Mobile and ubiquitous computing.
5. What is meant by location aware computing?
Mobile computing is the performance of computing tasks while the users are on the move
and away from their residence intranet but still provided with access to resources via the devices
they carry with them. They can continue to access the intranet, they can continue to access
resources in their home intranet, and there is increasing provision for users to utilize resources
such as printers that are conveniently nearby as they move around. This is known as location
aware computing.
6. What are the two type of resource sharing?
a. Hardware sharing: Printers. plotters and large disks and other peripherals are shared
to reduce costs.
b. Data sharing is important in many applications:
1. Software developers working in a team need to access each other’s code and
share the same development tools.

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2. Many commercial applications enable users to access shared data objects in a

single active database.
3. The rapidly growing area of group-ware tools enables users to cooperate with
in a network.
7. List the importance of data sharing?
 Software developers working in a team need to access each other’s code and share
the same development tools.
 Many commercial applications enable users to access shared data objects in a
single active database.
 The rapidly growing area of group- ware tools enables users to cooperate with in a
network.
8. Write the technological components of web?
 HTML
 HTTP-request-reply protocol
 URL’s
9. List the distributed systems challenges?
a. Heterogeneity: standards and protocols; middleware; virtual machine;
b. Openness: publication of services; notification of interfaces;
c: Security: firewalls; encryption;
d. Scalability: replication; caching; multiple servers;
e. Failure Handling. failure tolerance; recover/roll-back; redundancy;
f. Concurrency. concurrency control to ensure data consistency.
g. Transparency. Middleware; location transparent naming; anonymity

10. What are the three components of security?

Security for information resources has three components:
 Confidentiality: production against disclosure to unauthorized individuals.
 Integrity: production against or corruption.
 Availability: production against interference with the means to access the
resources.
11. What is the use of firewall?
A firewall can be used to form a barrier around an intranet to protect it from outside users
but does not deal with ensuring the appropriate use of resources by users within the intranet.
12. What are the security challenges? List them.
a. Denial of service attacks: Another security problem is that the user may wish to
disrupt a service for some reason. This can be achieved by bombarding the service
with such a large number of pointless requests that the serious users are unable to
use it. This is called a denial of service attack and there are many on well known
web services.
b. Security of mobile code: Mobile codes needed to be handled with care. PC users
sometimes send executable files as email attachments to be run by the recipient,
but a recipient will not be able to run it.
13. List the challenges to be considered for designing scalable distributed system?
 Controlling the cost of physical resources
 Controlling the performance loss

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 Preventing software resources running out

 Avoiding performance bottlenecks.

14. What are the types of transparencies?

a. Access transparency: enables local and remote resources to be accessed using
identical operations.
b. Location transparency: enables resources to be accessed without knowledge of
their location.
c. Concurrency transparency: enables several processes to operate concurrently
using shared resources without interference between them.
d. Replication transparency: enables multiple instances of resources to be used to
increase reliability and performance without knowledge of the replicas by users or
application programmers. `
e. Failure transparency: enables the concealment of faults, allowing users and
application programs to complete their tasks despite the failure of hardware or
software components.
f. Mobility transparency: allows the movement of resources and clients within a
system without affecting the operation of users or programs.
g. Performance transparency: allows the system to be reconfigures to implement
performance as loads vary.
h. Scaling transparency: allows the system and applications to expand in scale
without change to the system structure or the application algorithms.
i. Access and location transparency together provide network transparency.
15. What are the failures detected in DS?
Masking failures: Some detected failures can be hidden or made less severe. Examples
of hiding failures:
 Messages can be retransmitted when they fail to arrive
 File data can be written to a pair of disks that if one is corrupted, the other may still correct.
Tolerating failures: Most of the services in the Internet do exhibit failures. It would not
be practical for them to detect and hide all the failures occur in such network. Their clients are
designed to tolerate failures, which generally involve the users in that.
Recovery from failures: involves the design of software so that the state permanent data
can be rolled back after a server has crashed.
16. List the key design goals of DS?
a. Performance
b. Reliability
c. Scalability
d. Consistency
e. Security
17. List the technical design goals of DS?
a. Naming
b. Communication
c. Software structure
d. Workload allocation
e. Maintenance of consistency.

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18 .What is the use of multicast?

a. Locating an object: A process multicasts a message containing a name of a
resource to a group of server processes. Only the process that holds the resource
responds to the message.
b. Fault tolerance: A process multicasts its request to a group of identical server
processes. The group of servers can continue to provide their service even if one
of its members fails.
c. Multiple update: Used for example in video conferencing with multiple
participants.
19. Write the models used in workload allocation?
The following four models for workload allocation are presented here.
 Processor pool model
 Shared memory multiprocessors
 Parallel virtual machines
 Distributed shared memory.
20.What is meant by PVM?
PVM is an integrated set of software tools and libraries that emulates a general-purpose,
flexible heterogeneous concurrent computing framework on interconnected computers of varied
architecture. The overall objective of the PVM system is to enable a collection of computers to
be used cooperatively for concurrent or parallel computation.

21.What is meant by DSM?

Distributed shared memory (DSM): DSM provides a global shared address space
across the different machines on a cluster. The shared address space distinguishes it from
packages such as PVM that provide a message passing interface between machines. There is a
growing consensus in the parallel computing community that a shared memory interface is more
desirable from the application programmer’s viewpoint, allowing him to focus on algorithmic
development rather than on managing communication.

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22.List the types of consistencies in DS?

 Update consistency
 Replication consistency
 Cache consistency
 Failure consistency
 Clock consistency
23.List the user requirements used in design of DS?
 Functionality: what should the system do for the users.
 Quality of service: issue containing performance, reliability and security.
 Reconfigurability: the need to accommodate changes without causing disruption
of the actual service.
24.List the main types of architectural model?
a. Software architecture.
b. System architecture.
 Client server model
 Services provided by multiple servers.
 Proxy servers and cache.
 Peer processes.
25. Enumerate the factors to be considered for variations in client server model?
The factors considered for several variations on the client server model.
 The use of multiple servers and caches to increase performance and flexibility.
 The use of mobile code and mobile agents.
 User’s need for low cost components with limited hardware resources that are
simple to manage.
 The requirements to add remove mobile devices in a convenient manner.
26.What is meant by thin clients?
 This refers to software layer that supports a window based user interface on a
computer that is local to the user while executing application programs on a
remote computer.
 It has the low management and hardware costs, but it runs the application code of
user’s computer in the computer server, which is the powerful computer that has
the capacity to run large numbers of applications simultaneously. It can be
multiprocessor or cluster computer running a multiprocessor version of OS such
as UNIX or windows NT.
27.What is meant by x-11 window system?
a) The X-11 window system is a process that manages the display and interactive
input devices (keyboard, mouse) of the computer on which it runs. It provides an
extensive library of procedures (the X-11 protocol) for displaying and modifying
graphical objects in windows as well as the creation and manipulation of
windows.
b) The X-11 system is referred to as a window server process. The clients of the X-
11 server are the application programs that the user is currently interacting with.

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c) The client programs communicate with the server by invoking operation in the X-
11 protocol, these include operations to draw text and graphical objects in
windows.
28.Enumerate the key features of spontaneous networking?
a. Easy connection to a local network: Wireless links avoid the need for pre-
installed cabling and avoid the inconvenience and reliability issues surrounding
plugs and sockets.
b. Easy integration with local services: Devices are able to find themselves
inserted into existing networks of devices discover automatically what services
are provided there, with no special configuration actions by the user.
29.List the design issues to be considered for spontaneous networking?
a. Limited connectivity: Users are not always connected as they move around.
They are irregularly disconnected from wireless network as they travel through
tunnels by train. They may also be totally disconnected for longer periods of time
in regions where wireless connectivity ceases or it is too expensive to remain
connected.
b. Security and privacy: Many vulnerable security issues arises due to the attempt
of wireless connections in unsupervised way. Some systems track the physical
locations of users as they move around and this may threaten the user’s privacy.
This facility enables users to access their home intranet while on the move may
expose data that is supposed to remain behind the intranet firewall or it may open
up the intranet to attacks from outside.
c. Discovery services: Spontaneous networking requires client processes running on
portable devices and other appliances to access services on the networks to which
they are connected. Here the clients discover what services are available in the
network to which they are connected and to investigate their properties. The
purpose of a discovery service is to accept and store details of services that are
available on the network and to respond to queries from clients about them.
30.What is the purpose solved by fundamental model?
 In general, such a fundamental model should contain only the essential
ingredients that we need to consider understanding and reasoning about some
aspects of a system’s behaviour. The purpose of such a model is:
 To make explicit all the relevant assumptions about the system we are modelling.
 To make generalization concerning what is possible or impossible, given those
assumptions. The guarantees are our assumptions clear and explicit, we can hope
to prove system properties using mathematical techniques. These properties will
then hold for any system meeting our assumptions.
31.How the fundamental models are categorized?
a. Interaction
b. Failure
c. Security

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32.List out the characteristics of performance of DS?

The following performance characteristics relating to latency, bandwidth and jitter.
a. Latency: The delay between the start of a message’s transmission from one
process and the beginning of its receipt by another is referred to as latency.
b. Bandwidth: The bandwidth of a computer network is the total amount of
information that can be transmitted over it in a given time. When large number of
communication channels are using the same network, they have to share the
available bandwidth.
c. Jitter. Jitter is the variation in the time taken to deliver a serious of messages.
Jitter is relevant to multimedia data. For example, if consecutive samples of audio
data are played with differing time intervals, the sound will be badly distorted.

33.What is synchronous DS?

1) The time to execute each step of a process has known lower and upper bounds.
2) Each message transmitted over a channel is received within a known bounded
time.
3) Each process has a local clock whose drift rate from real time has a known bound.
4) It is possible to suggest likely upper and lower bounds for process execution time,
message delay and clock drift rates in a distributed system, but it is difficult to
arrive at realistic values and to provide guarantees of the chosen values.
5) In a synchronous system it is possible to use timeouts, for example to detect the
failure of a process.
34.What is asynchronous DS?
1. Many distributed systems, such as the Intranet, qualify as asynchronous system.
2. An asynchronous distributed system is one in which there are no bounds on:
1. Process execution speeds-for example, one process step may take only a
picoseconds and another a century; all that can be said is that each step may take an arbitrarily
long time.
2. Message transmission delays-for example, one message from process A to
process B may be delivered in negligible time and another may take several years. In other
words, a message may be received after an arbitrarily long time.
3. Clock drift rates- again, the drift rate of a clock is arbitrary.
35. What is omission failure?
The faults classified as omission failures refer to cases when a process or communication
channel fails to perform actions that it is supposed to do.
36.What is meant by arbitrary failure?
1) The term arbitrary or Byzantine failure is used to describe the worst possible
failure semantics, in which any type of error may occur. For example, a process
may set wrong values in its data items, or it may return a wrong value in response
to an invocation.
2) An arbitrary failure of a process is one in which in arbitrarily omits intended
processing steps to takes unintended processing steps. Arbitrary failures in
processes cannot be detected by seeing whether the process responds to
invocations, because it might arbitrarily omit to reply.

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37.List out the characteristics of networks hidden by stream abstraction?

a) Message sizes: The application can choose how much data it writes to a stream or
reads from it. It may deal in very small or very large sets of data. The underlying
implementation of a TCP stream decides how much data to collect before
transmitting it as one or more IP packets.
b) ost messages: The TCP protocol uses an acknowledgement scheme. As an
example of a simple scheme (which is not used in TCP), the sending end keeps a
record of each IP packet sent and receiving end acknowledges all the arrivals. If
the sender does not receive an acknowledgement within a timeout, it retransmits
the message.
c) Flow control: The TCP protocol attempts to match the speeds of the processes
that read from and write to a stream. If the writer is too fast the reader, then it is
blocked until the reader has consumed sufficient data.
d) Message duplication and ordering: Message identifiers are associated with each
IP packet, which enables the recipient to detect and reject duplicates, or to reorder
message that do not arrive in sender order.
e) Message destinations: A pair of communication processes establishes a
connection before they can communicate over a stream. Once a connection is
established, the processes simply read from and write to the stream without
needing to use Internet addresses and ports. Establishing a connection involves a
connect request from client to server followed by an accept request from server to
client before any communication can take place.
38.List the issues related to stream communication?
a. Matching of data items: Two communicating processes need to agree as to the
contents of the data transmitted over a stream. For example, if one process writes
an int followed by a double to a stream, then the reader at the other end must read
an int followed by a double. When a pair of processes does not cooperate
correctly in their use of a stream, the reading process may experience errors when
interpreting the data or may block due to insufficient data in the stream.
b. Blocking: The data written to a stream is kept in a queue at the destination socket.
When a process attempts to read data from an input channel, it will get data from
the queue or it will block until data becomes available. The process that writes
data to a stream may be blocked by the TCP flow-control mechanism if the socket
at the other end is queuing as much data as the protocol allows.
c. Threads: When a server accepts a connection, it generally creates a new thread
in which to communicate with the new client. The advantage of using a separate
thread for each client is that the sever can block when waiting for input without
delaying other clients.
d. Failure model: To satisfy the integrity to property of reliable communication,
TCP streams use checksums to detect and reject corrupt packets and sequence
numbers to detect and reject duplicate packets. For the deal with lost packets.
Therefore, messages are guaranteed to be delivered ever when some of the
underlying packets are lost.
39. What is marshalling and unmarshalling?
 An agreed standard for the representation of data structures and primitive values
is called an external and data representation
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 Marshalling is the process of taking a collection of data items and assembling

them into a form suitable for transmission in a message.
 Unmarshalling is the process of disassembling them on arrival to produce an
equivalent collection of data items at the destination. Thus marshalling consists of
the translation of structured data items and primitives values into an external data
representation. Similarly, unmarshalling consists of the generation of primitive
values from their external data representation and the rebuilding of the data
structures.
40.What are the approaches used in data representation?
a. CORBA’s common data representation, which is concerned with an external
representation for the structured and primitive types that can be passed as the
arguments and results of remote method invocations in CORBA. It can be used by
a variety of programming languages.
b. Java’s object serialization, which is concerned with the flattering and external
data representation of any single object or tree of objects that may need to be
transmitted in a message or stored on a disk. It is for use only by java.
c. XML (Extensible Markup Language), which defines a textual format for
representing structured data. It was originally intended for documents containing
textual self-describing structured data-for example documents accessible on the
Web- but it is now also used to represent the data sent in message exchanged by
clients and servers in web services.

16 MARK QUESTIONS

1. Explain the need of Distributed systems its characteristics with example

 Fault tolerance
 Consistency
 Security
 Reliability
 Concurrent transactions
2. Explain how resource sharing is done in the web
 Patterns of resource sharing vary widely in their scope and in how closely users
work together. At one extreme, a search engine on the Web provides a facility to
users throughout the world, users who need never come into contact with one
another directly. At the other extreme, in computer-supported cooperative
working(CSCW), a group of users who cooperate directly share resources such as
documents in a small, closed group. The pattern of sharing and the geographic
distribution of particular users determines what mechanisms the system must
supply to coordinate users’ actions.

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 Types of resources:
 Hardware resources
 Data
 Service

3. Explain the challenges to be considered in the design of DS

 Heterogeneity
 Openness
 Security
 Scalability
 Failure handling
 Concurrency
 Transparency
 Quality of service

4. What are the trends in Distributed systems.

 Distributed systems are undergoing a period of significant change and this can be
traced back to a number of influential trends:
 the emergence of pervasive networking technology;
 the emergence of ubiquitous computing coupled with the desire to support
user mobility in distributed systems;
 the increasing demand for multimedia services;
 the view of distributed systems as a utility.
 Pervasive networking and the modern Internet
 Mobile and ubiquitous computing
 Distributed multimedia systems
 Distributed computing as a utility

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