Characterization of Distributed Systems

From Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and

Blair
Distributed Systems:
Concepts and Design
Edition 5, © Addison-Wesley 2012
 Objectives
• To be aware of the characteristics of concurrency,
independent failure of components and lack of a global
• clock, which necessarily arise in a distributed system
consisting of components that coordinate their actions only
by passing messages.
• To place distributed systems in a realistic context through
examples: the Internet, an intranet and mobile computing.
• To motivate the benefits of resource sharing and to
introduce the Web as an example.
• To gain a good understanding of the challenges related to
heterogeneity, openness, security, scalability, failure
handling, concurrency and transparency as they apply to
distributed systems.
 Definition
• a distributed system as one in which hardware
or software components located at networked
computers communicate and coordinate their
actions only by passing messages.
 Consequence from the definition
• Concurrency: In a network of computers,
concurrent program execution is the norm.
• No global clock: When programs need to
cooperate they coordinate their actions by
exchanging messages.
• Independent failures: All computer systems
can fail, and it is the responsibility of system
designers to plan for the consequences of
possible failures.
 Application domains and associated networked
applications
Finance and commerce eCommerce e.g. Amazon and eBay, PayPal,
online banking and trading
The information society Web information and search engines, ebooks,
Wikipedia; social networking: Facebook and
MySpace.
Creative industries and online gaming, music and film in the home,
entertainment user-generated content, e.g. YouTube, Flickr
Healthcare health informatics, on online patient records,
monitoring patients
Education e-learning, virtual learning environments;
distance learning
Transport and logistics GPS in route finding systems, map services:
Google Maps, Google Earth
Science The Grid as an enabling technology for
collaboration between scientists
Environmental management sensor technology to monitor earthquakes,
5 floods
Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and or
Blair, tsunamis
Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
 Example 1: Web Search
• Global number of searches has risen to over 10 billion
per calendar month
• A very complex task: 63 billion pages, 1 trillion unique
web, wide range of information styles
• Behind the scene:
– Physical infrastructure: very large numbers of networked
computer located at data centers all around the world
– Distributed files systems
– Associated structured distributed storage system
– Lock services
– Programming model
 Example 2: Massively Multiplayer
Online Games
• an immersive experience whereby very large
numbers of users interact through the Internet
with a persistent virtual world
• Online consist with over 5,000 star systems,
50,000 simultaneous online players, 500,000
players
• Behind the scene:
– Client-server architectures
– Partitioned across a number of distributed servers
– Will pursue the decentralized based on peer-to-peer
technology
 Example 3: Financial trading system

8 Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
 Trend in Distributed Systems
1. the emergence of pervasive networking
technology;
2. the emergence of ubiquitous computing
coupled with the desire to support user
mobility in distributed systems;
3. the increasing demand for multimedia
services;
4. the view of distributed systems as a utility.
 1. Pervasive Networking and the
Internet

intranet ☎
☎
☎ ISP

backbone

satellite link

desktop computer:
server:
network link:

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
 2. Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing
• Device miniaturization and wireless networking:
– Laptop computers.
– Handheld devices, including mobile phones, smart
phones, GPS-enabled devices, pagers, personal digital
assistants (PDAs), video cameras and digital cameras.
– Wearable devices, such as smart watches with
functionality similar to a PDA.
– Devices embedded in appliances such as washing
machines, hi-fi systems, cars and refrigerators.
Portable and handheld devices in a distributed
system

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
3. Distributed Multimedia Systems
• A distributed multimedia system should be
able to perform the same functions for
continuous media types such as audio and
video; that is, it should be able to store and
locate audio or video files, to transmit them
across the network (possibly in real time as
the streams emerge from a video camera), to
support the presentation of the media types
to the user and optionally also to share the
media types across a group of users.
 4. Distributed Computing as a Utility
• resources are provided by appropriate service
suppliers and effectively rented rather than
owned by the end user.
– Physical resources: storage and processing
available to networked computers
– Software services, available across the global
internet
 Cloud computing

15 Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Resource Sharing
 Challenges (1)
• Heterogeneity
– networks; computer hardware; operating systems;
programming languages; implementations by different
developers.
• Openness:
– Open systems are characterized by the fact that their key
interfaces are published.
– Open distributed systems are based on the provision of a
uniform communication mechanism and published
interfaces for access to shared resources.
– Open distributed systems can be constructed from
heterogeneous hardware and software, possibly from
different vendors.
 Challenges (2)
• Security
– Denial of service
– Security of mobile code
• Scalability
– Controlling the cost of physical resources
– Controlling the performance loss
– Preventing software resources running out.
 Growth of the Internet (computers
and web servers)

Date Computers Web servers Percentage

1993, July 1,776,000 130 0.008

1995, July 6,642,000 23,500 0.4
1997, July 19,540,000 1,203,096 6
1999, July 56,218,000 6,598,697 12
2001, July 125,888,197 31,299,592 25
2003, July ~200,000,000 42,298,371 21
2005, July 353,284,187 67,571,581 19

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
 Challenges (3)
• Failure Handling
– Detecting failures
– Masking failures
– Tolerating failures
– Recovery from failures
– Redundancy
• Concurrency
 Challenges (4): Transparencies
Access transparency: enables local and remote resources to be accessed using identical
operations.
Location transparency: enables resources to be accessed without knowledge of their physical
or network location (for example, which building or IP address).
Concurrency transparency: enables several processes to operate concurrently using shared
resources without interference between them.
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.
Failure transparency: enables the concealment of faults, allowing users and application
programs to complete their tasks despite the failure of hardware or software components.
Mobility transparency: allows the movement of resources and clients within a system
without affecting the operation of users or programs.
Performance transparency: allows the system to be reconfigured to improve performance
as loads vary.
Scaling transparency: allows the system and applications to expand in scale without change
to the system structure or the application algorithms.

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
 Challenges (5)
• Quality of Service
– Reliability,
– Security,
– Performance
– Adaptability
• QoS has effectively been commandeered to
refer to the ability of systems to meet such
deadlines.
 Case Study:
Web servers and web browsers
Web servers Browsers

http://www.google.comlsearch?q=obama
www.google.com

www.cdk5.net Internet
http://www.cdk5.net/

www.w3c.org

File system of http://www.w3.org/standards/faq.html#conformanc

www.w3c.org standards e

faq.html

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
 Important component?
• HTML
• URL
• DNS
• Downloaded code
• Dynamic Pages?