Distributed Computing

UNIT - I
1. Define distributed systems. A distributed system is a piece of software that ensures that: A collection of independent computers that appears to its users as a single coherent system or single system. 2. Give examples of distributed systems. Financial trading Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) Web search Network of workstations Automatic banking (teller machine) system Automotive system (a distributed real-time system) Distributed Real-Time Systems Synchronization of physical clocks Scheduling with hard time constraints Real-time communication Fault tolerance. 3. Write the following (i)HTTP (ii) HTML (iii) URL HTTP: The HyperText Transfer Protocol defines the ways in which browsers and other types of client interact with web servers.HTTP is a request-reply protocol. The client sends a request message to the server containing the URL of the required resource. The server looks up the path name and, if it exists, sends back the resources content in a reply message to the client. Otherwise, it sends back an error response such as the familiar 404 Not Found. HTML: The HyperText Markup Language is used to specify the text and images that make up the contents of a web page, and to specify how they are laid out and formatted for presentation to the user. A web page contains such structured items as headings, paragraphs, tables and images. URL: The purpose of a Uniform Resource Locator is to identify a resource.Browsers examine URLs in order to access the corresponding resources. Sometimes the user types a URL into the browser. More commonly, the browser looks up the corresponding URL when the user clicks on a link or selects one of their bookmarks; or when the browser fetches a resource embedded in a web page,such as an image. For example, mailto:joe@anISP.net identifies a users email address; ftp://ftp.downloadIt.com/software/aProg.exe identifies a file that is to be retrieved using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) rather than the more commonly used protocol HTTP.

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4.What are the uses of web services? A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the Web (Internet).Web services are intrinsically integrated into the World Wide Web, using web standards to represent and discover services. The World Wide Web consortium (W3C). 5.Define heterogeneity. The Internet enables users to access services and run applications over a heterogeneouscollection of computers and networks. Heterogeneity (that is, variety and difference) applies to all of the following: networks; computer hardware; operating systems; programming languages; implementations by different developers. 6.What are the characteristics of heterogeneity? When event notifications are used as a means of communication, components in a distributed system that were not designed to interoperate can be made to work together. All that is required is that event-generating objects publish the types of events they offer, and that other objects subscribe to patterns of events and provide an interface for receiving and dealing with the resultant notifications. For example,publish-subscribe systems describes how to connect heterogeneous components in the Internet. 7.What is the purpose of heterogeneity mobile code? Several recently developed programming languages have been designed to enable programs to be loaded into a process from a remote server and then executed locally. In that case, the internal interfaces and objects within an executing process may be exposed to attack by mobile code. 8. Why we need openness? The openness of a computer system is the characteristic that determines whether the system can be extended and reimplemented in various ways. The openness of distributed systems is determined primarily by the degree to which new resource-sharing services can be added and be made available for use by a variety of client programs. 9. How we provide security? Many of the information resources that are made available and maintained in distributed systems have a high intrinsic value to their users. Their security is therefore of considerable importance. Security for information resources has three components: confidentiality (protection against disclosure to unauthorized individuals), integrity (protection against alteration or corruption), and availability (protection against interference with the means to access the resources). 10. Define scalability. Distributed systems operate effectively and efficiently at many different scales, ranging from a small intranet to the Internet. A system is described as scalable if it will remain effective

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when there is a significant increase in the number of resources and the number of users. The number of computers and servers in the Internet has increased dramatically. 11. What are the types of transparencies? Various transparencies types are as follows, Access transparency Location transparency Concurrency transparency Replication transparency Failure transparency Failure transparency Performance transparency Scaling transparency 12. Define transparencies. Transparency is defined as the concealment from the user and the application programmer of the separation of components in a distributed system, so that the system is perceived as a whole rather than as a collection of independent components. The implications of transparency are a major influence on the design of the system software. 13. Define System model. The system under consideration contains a collection of processes, which can communicate reliably over one-to-one channels. As before, processes may fail only by crashing. system model includes a collection of processes pi ( i = 1, 2,.., N ) communicatingby message passing. An important requirement that applies in many practical situations is for consensus to be reached even in the presence of faults. 14. What is the architectural model? Architectural models describe a system in terms of the computational and communication tasks performed by its computational elements; the computational elements being individual computers or aggregates of them supported by appropriate network interconnections. Clientserver and peer-to-peer are two of the most commonly used forms of architectural model for distributed systems. 15. What is the fundamental model? Fundamental models take an abstract perspective in order to describe solutions to individual issues faced by most distributed systems.fundamental model should contain only the essential ingredients that we need to consider in order to understand and reason about some aspects of a systems behaviour. The purpose of such a model is: To make explicit all the relevant assumptions about the systems we are modelling. To make generalizations concerning what is possible or impossible, given those assumptions. The generalizations may take the form of general-purpose algorithms or desirable properties that are guaranteed. The guarantees are dependent on logical analysis and, where appropriate, mathematical proof. 17. Define Middleware. The term middleware applies to a software layer that provides a programming abstraction as well as masking the heterogeneity of the underlying networks, hardware, operating systems and programming languages.In addition to solving the problems of heterogeneity, middleware provides a uniform computational model for use by the programmers of servers and distributed applications.

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18. What are the different types of model? Each typeof model is intended to provide an abstract, simplified but consistent description of a relevant aspect of distributed system design: Physical models are the most explicit way in which to describe a system; they capture the hardware composition of a system in terms of the computers (and other devices, such as mobile phones) and their interconnecting networks. Architectural models describe a system in terms of the computational and communication tasks performed by its computational elements; the computational elements being individual computers or aggregates of them supported by appropriate network interconnections. Fundamental models take an abstract perspective in order to examine individual aspects of a distributed system. 19. Which type of network can be used by distributed system? The networks used in distributed systems are built from a variety of transmission media, including wire, cable, fibre and wireless channels; hardware devices, including routers, switches, bridges, hubs, repeaters and network interfaces; and software components, including protocol stacks, communication handlers and drivers. The resulting functionality and performance available to distributed system and application programs is affected by all of these.The computers and other devices that use the network for communication purposes are referred to as hosts. The term node is used to refer to any computer or switching device attached to a network. 20. What are the different types of network? The main types of network that are used to support distributed systems: personal area networks, local area networks, wide area networks, metropolitan area networks and the wireless variants of them. Internetworks such as the Internet are constructed from networks of all these types. 21. Define latency. The delay between the start of a messages transmission from one process and the beginning of its receipt by another is referred to as latency. The latency includes: The time taken for the first of a string of bits transmitted through a network to reach its destination. For example, the latency for the transmission of a message through a satellite link is the time for a radio signal to travel to the satellite and back. The time taken by the operating system communication services at both the sending and the receiving processes, which varies according to the current load on the operating systems. 22. What is meant by networking? Networking is the practice of linking two or more computing devices together for the purpose of sharing data. Networks are built with a mix of computer hardware and computer software. Where at least one process in one device is able to send/receive data to/from at least one process residing in a remote device, then the two devices are said to be in a network. 23. What is meant by internetworking? Internetworking is the practice of connecting a computer network with other networks through the use of gateways that provide a common method of routing information packets between the networks. The resulting system of interconnected networks is called an internetwork, or simply an internet.The most notable example of internetworking is the Internet.

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24. What are the different types of switching are used in computer networking? To transmit information between two arbitrary nodes, a switching system is required. Here we define the four types of switching that are used in computer networking. Broadcast Circuit switching Packet switching Frame relay 26. Define protocol. The term protocol is used to refer to a well-known set of rules and formats to be used for communication between processes in order to perform a given task. The definition of a protocol has two important parts to it: a specification of the sequence of messages that must be exchanged; a specification of the format of the data in the messages. 27. What is the function of router? The function of a router is to manage the paths along which information is forwarded within a network. They are necessary to facilitate communication between computers and the Internet. 28. What is meant by internet protocol? An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a numerical identification (logical address) that is assigned to devices participating in a computer networkutilizing the Internet Protocol for communication between its nodes.Although IP addresses are stored as binary numbers,they are usually displayed in human-readable notations,such as 208.77.188.166 (for IPv4. 29. Define domain name. The DNS translates Internet domain and host names to IP addresses. DNS automatically converts the names we type in our Web browser address bar to the IP addresses of Web servers hosting those sites. DNS implements a distributed database to store this name and address information for all public hosts on the Internet. DNS assumes IP addresses do not change (are statically assigned rather than dynamically assigned). 30. Define mobile IP. The Mobile IP protocol allows location-independent routing of IP datagrams on the Internet. Each mobile node is identified by its home address disregarding its current location in the Internet. While away from its home network, a mobile node is associated with a care-of address which identifies its current location and its home address is associated with the local endpoint of a tunnel to its home agent. Mobile IP specifies how a mobile node registers with its home agent and how the home agent routes datagrams to the mobile node through the tunnel.

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UNIT II PART - A (2 marks) 1. What is meant by interprocess Communication? Interprocess communication consists of transmitting a message between a socket in one process and a socket in another process For a process to receive messages, its socket must be bound to a local port and one of the Internet addresses of the computer on which it runs. Messages sent to a particular Internet address and port number can be received only by a process whose socket is associated with that Internet address and port number. 2. What is the difference between RMI and RPC? In RMI, a calling object can invoke a method in a potentially remote object. As with RPC, the underlying details are generally hidden from the userRMI allows the programmer to pass parameters not only by value, as input or output parameters, but also by object referenceThe remote procedure call approach was a significant breakthrough in distributed systems, providing higher-level support for programmers by extending the concept of a procedure call to operate in a networked environment. 3.Define Datagram. The term datagram refers to the similarity of this delivery mode to the way in which letters and telegrams are delivered. The essential feature of datagram networks is that the delivery of each packet is a one-shotprocess; no setup is required, and once the packet is delivered the network retains no information about it. 4. What is the use of UDP? For some applications, it is acceptable to use a service that is liable to occasional omission failures. For example, the Domain Name System, which looks up DNS names in the Internet, is implemented over UDP. Voice over IP (VOIP) also runs over UDP. UDP datagrams are sometimes an attractive choice because they do not suffer from the overheads associated with guaranteed message delivery. 5. What are the methods provides by datagram socket? For a process to receive messages, its socket must be bound to a local port and one of the Internet addresses of the computer on which it runs.Messages sent to a particular Internet address and port number can be received only by a process whose socket is associated with that Internet address and port number.Processes may use the same socket for sending and receiving messages. Each computer has a large number (216) of possible port numbers for use by local processes for receiving messages. Any process may make use of multiple ports to receive messages, but a process cannot share ports with other processes on the same computer. 6. What are the characteristic of network hidden by stream abstraction? The following characteristics of the network are hidden by the stream abstraction: Message sizes Lost messages Flow control

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Message duplication and ordering Message destinations 7. What is the use of remote object references? When a client invokes a method in a remote object, an invocation message is sent to the server process that hosts the remote object. This message needs to specify which particular object is to have its method invoked. A remote object reference is an identifier for a remote object that is valid throughout a distributed system. A remote object reference is passed in the invocation message to specify which object is to be invoked. 8. What is meant by client server communication? client-server communication, with a different (private) region between the server and each of its local clients. Such a region contains one or more A (for argument) stacks To support client-server communication, SOAP specifies how to use the HTTP POST method for the request message and its response for the reply message. The combined use of XML and HTTP provides a standard protocol for client-server communication over the Internet. 9. What is meant by group communication? Group communication is particularly useful for achieving fault tolerance,which describes techniques for high availability, including disconnected operation. It includes case studies of the gossip architecture, Bayou and the Coda file system. It also examines how to support transactions on replicated data. 10. What is the use of RMI registry? The RMIregistry is the binder for Java RMI. An instance of RMIregistry should normally run on every server computer that hosts remote objects. It maintains a table mapping textual, URL-style names to references to remote objects hosted on that computer. It is accessed by methods of the Naming class, whose methods take as an argument a URLformatted string of the form: //computerName:port/objectName where computerName and port refer to the location of the RMIregistry. 11. What is meant by distributed garbage collection? An object is considered to be garbage if there are no longer any references to it anywhere in the distributed system. The memory taken up by that object can be reclaimed once it is known to be garbage. To check that an object is garbage, we must verify that there are no references to it anywhere in the system. For example process p1 has two objects that both have references one has a reference within p1 itself, and p2 has a reference to the other. Process p2 has one garbage object, with no references to it anywhere in the system. It also has an object for which neither p1 nor p2 has a reference, but there is a reference to it in a message that is in transit between the processes.

12. Explain the use of Reflection in RMI?

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Reflection is a pattern that is increasingly being used in distributed systems as a means of supporting both introspection (the dynamic discovery of properties of the system) and intercession (the ability to dynamically modify structure or behaviour). For example, the introspection capabilities of Java are used effectively in the implementation of RMI to provide generic dispatching. 13. Define Name spaces. A name space is the collection of all valid names recognized by a particular service. The service will attempt to look up a valid name, even though that name may prove not to correspond to any object i.e., to be unbound. Name spaces require a syntactic definition to separate valid names from invalid names. For example, ... is not acceptable as the DNS name of a computer, whereas www.cdk99.net is valid (even though it is unbound).

UNIT-III PART - A (2 marks)

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1.What are core OS Components? The core OS components and their responsibilities are: Process manager Thread manager Communication manager Memory manager Supervisor 2. What is meant by cluster? 3. Define Thread. 4. What is meant by address space? 5. What is meant by invocation performance? 6. Difference between monolithic and micro kernels 7. What is meant by cryptography? 8. What is the use of cryptography? 9. What is meant by distributed file system? 10. What are the different types of distributed file system available? 11. Define metadata.

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