UGANDA CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

THIRD YEAR, BACHELORS OF SCIENCE IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

ADVENT SEMESTER TAKE HOME EXAMINATION 2020

IN

DISTRIBUTED AND CLOUD COMPUTING

Instructions

EXAMINATION GUIDELINES

1. A “take home” exam is “a recognized alternative form of assessment where students take their
assessment off-campus within a specified timeframe. It does not require students to
necessarily take the test in their own home”.
2. The university has important rules for exams. Please carefully read the instructions below.

Failure to comply with any of the instructions below may result in our being unable to accept or
grade your exam or initiating disciplinary actions.
a. This exam is “open book,” which means you are permitted to use any materials handed
out in class, your own notes from the course, the text book, and anything on the UCU
learning management system
b. The exam must be taken completely alone. Showing it or discussing it with anyone is
forbidden.
c. Please don’t consult with any other person regarding the exam. Don’t check your exam
answers with any person.
d. Any other examination guidelines
3. Attempt only FOUR questions
NB: The University does not require your physical presence on any of Uganda Christian University
campuses or colleges
Question 1:
a. Technology trends continue to increase the processing capabilities of mobile devices. The latest
smartphones include up to 8 processing cores and often have fairly powerful GPUs as well. In spite of
this, it may make sense to offload computation to the cloud or a cloudlet. Describe two (2)
circumstances under which it might be beneficial to offload application functionality from such a
powerful smartphone? [6 marks]
b. OSs use privileged instructions to manage hardware resources like page tables and I/O devices. When
executed with a VM on a modern hypervisor providing full hardware virtualization, what happens when
a guest OS executes a privileged instruction of this sort? Explain your answer. [8 marks]
c. Greg believes par virtualization generally outperforms full hardware-level virtualization. What is one
advantage of full hardware virtualization over par virtualization? Explain your answer. [4 marks]
d. Discuss techniques for achieving high-performance in distributed file systems. [7 marks]
Question 2:
a. During a course project in AWS or a similar cloud services, imagine running an application that could
have access to a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), an Elastic Block Service (EBS) and a
Simple Storage Service (S3). i. Which of the three storage options would you expect to be the easiest
for a traditional enterprise application to be modified to use, and why? [10 marks]
b. Which of the three storage options is the most likely to provide the highest total data bandwidth, and
what design feature is most likely to provide this performance advantage? [6 marks]
c. Discuss peer-to-peer architectural model for construction of distributed systems. [9 marks]
Question 3:
a. A Map Reduce Job consists of many tasks that are distributed among Task Trackers for execution.
Sometimes, even when the machines and the tasks are identical, a few of the tasks will take much
longer to complete than the others. But, a map or reduce stage cannot complete until its constituent
tasks all complete. Describe a technique used by both Google’s Map Reduce and Hadoop Map
Reduce to mitigate this problem. Explain why it is safe and effective. [8 marks]
b. Imagine that a user submits a job to the Mesos scheduler that manages their company’s cluster. The
job needs to run on one of a particular subset of machines that have particular software pre-loaded and
configured on them. If all of those machines are currently fully allocated to other equal-priority jobs,
what do you believe will happen with the new job? [8 marks]
c. Identify various types of resources that can usefully be shared in computer networks. Give examples of
their sharing as it occurs in distributed systems. [9 marks]
Question 4:
Bellah Inc. (Bellainc.com) is a local startup that has been asked by the city to monitor and record near
misses and accidents between cars, bicyclists and pedestrians 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, and 365
days per year. Bella Inc. (BI) is planning to deploy video cameras and dedicated computing at each busy
intersection in the city. BI plans to capture video at a sustained frame grab rate of 20 frames per second, 24
hours per day. They will provide privacy to drivers, cyclists and pedestrians by denaturing the video at the
intersection, before it is stored. Since the bandwidth from the intersection to the cloud is limited, BI plans to
process the streams of data at the intersection to identify near misses and accidents. They will then send
the data for just the “interesting” cases to the cloud for storage and potential further analysis.
i. We know that cloud computing offers various benefits and features to users. For each benefit listed
below, indicate whether you believe it would be important to Bellah Inc and describe why. [12
marks]
Cloud Advantages Beneficial or not Beneficial to BI Why?
VM Elasticity
No upfront Costs
Reduced IT Maintenance
ii. At your internship job, an older programmer, Kamal, comments that cloud computing was invented
because of special shopping days like Cyber Monday in the US, during which Amazon does over
$3B in online sales, or Single’s Day in China, during which Alibaba does over $14B in online sales.
a) Give one reason why this might be false (and explain). That is, why might Cyber Monday and
Single’s Day not be great examples for cloud computing? [5 marks]
iii. Discuss important operating systems services that are essential for supporting the development of
concurrent and scalable distributed systems. [8 marks]
Question5:
You need the perfect cloud deployment model to help you gain a competitive edge in the market place and
through this, you will have access to IT resources and services that can make your business flexible and
agile, both concerning volume and scale. In this respect, discuss the different deployment models in cloud
computing: Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Community Cloud and Hybrid Cloud [20 marks]
a. Explain what system integrators are in cloud computing? Give examples where possible. [5 marks]

The end- Success