UNIT-1

PART-A

1.Define distributed Systems.

Definition 1: A distributed system as one in which hardware or software components located at
networked computers communicate and coordinate their actions only by passing messages
Definition 2:. A collection of hardware and software systems that contain more than one
processing or storage element but appearing as a single coherent system running under a loosely
or tightly controlled regime is called Distributed Computing. The computers in the distributed
system do not share a memory instead they pass messages asynchronously or synchronously
between them. This is a type of segmented or parallel computing that runs on a heterogeneous
system.
2.What are the examples of Distributed System?
Web search, Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs),Financial trading, Cloud
computing, Grid computing, Ubiquitous or pervasive computing
3.List the advantages and disadvantages of Distributed System.
Advantages
 Economics
 Speed
 Inherent distribution
 Reliability
 Incremental growth
 Resource sharing
Disadvantages
 Heterogeneity
 Openness
 Failure handling
 Quality of service
 Security
4.What are the challenges in Distributed System?
 Heterogeneity
 Openness
 Failure handling
 Quality of service
 Security
 Transparency
 Scalability
 Concurrency
5.Show where Distributed System is applied?
Telecommunication networks:
  telephone networks and cellular networks,
 computer networks such as the Internet,
 wireless sensor networks,
 routing algorithms;
Network applications:

 World wide web and peer-to-peer networks,

 massively multiplayer online games and virtual reality communities,
 distributed databases and distributed database management systems,
 network file systems,
 distributed information processing systems such as banking systems and airline
reservation systems;
Real-time process control:
 aircraft control systems,
 industrial control systems;
Parallel computation:
 scientific computing, including cluster computing and grid computing and
various volunteer computing projects (see the list of distributed computing projects),
 distributed rendering in computer graphics.
6.Estimate how distributed system benefits resource sharing?
Resource sharing benefits by allowing the users to share hardware resources such as printers,
data resources such as files, and resources with more specific functionality such as search
engines. pages – not the disks and processors on which they are implemented. Similarly, users
think in terms of shared resources such as a search engine or a currency converter, without
regard for the server or servers that provide these.
7.Define CSCW
Computer-supported cooperative working (CSCW), a group of users who cooperate directly
share resources such as documents in a small, closed group.
8.What is MMOG
Massively multiplayer online games is an online video game where very large numbers of users
interact through the Internet with a persistent virtual world. Leading examples of such games
include Sony’s EverQuest II and EVE Online from the Finnish company CCP Games.
9.Discuss the trends of Distributed System.
 Pervasive networking and modern internet
 Mobile and ubiquitous computing
 Distributed in Multimedia system
 Distributed computing as a utility.
10.Compare Centralized and Distributed System.

Centralized systems Distributed System

Several jobs are done on a particular CPU Jobs are distributed among several
processors. The processors are
 interconnected by a computer network.

They have shared memory and shared They have no global state (i.e No shared
variables. memory and No shared variables)

Global clock is present No global clock

11.Generalize on Heterogeneity.

It means diversity of distributed system in terms of hardware, software, platform, etc. Modern
distributed system will likely to be operating with different hardware devices, operating system,
Network, programming language etc.

12.Explain the consequences faced by the designers in developing distributed systems.

Refer challenges of distributed system(Q.No:4)
13.Define Ubiquitous computing.
Ubiquitous computing is the harnessing of many small, cheap computational devices that are
present in users’ physical environments, including the home, office and even natural settings.  A
user interacts with the computer, which can exist in many different forms, including laptop
computers, tablets and terminals in everyday objects such as a fridge or a pair of glasses.
14.Show how distributed System helps cloud computing
Cloud Computing is a specialized form of Distributed Computing. Cloud Computing takes
Distributed Computing to a utility stage, ubiquitous and unmetered access to broadband Internet
is the key to its success. In addition, better standardization, portability and interoperability of its
distributed components will help move Cloud Computing to its full potential. Cloud Computing
is all about delivering services or applications in on demand environment with targeted goals of
achieving increased scalability and transparency, security, monitoring and management. In cloud
computing systems, services are delivered with transparency not considering the physical
implementation within the Cloud.
15.Illustrate the concept of concurrency.
Both services and applications provide resources that can be shared by clients in a distributed
system. There is therefore a possibility that several clients will attempt to access a shared
resource at the same time. The process that manages a shared resource could take one client
request at a time. But that approach limits throughput. Therefore services and applications
generally allow multiple client requests to be processed concurrently.
16.What do you mean by transparency?
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. Inter process communication is
transparent at the application level, Whereas invisible to the user level to maintain a single
system view.
17. Develop the scenario how might the clocks in two computers that are linked by a local
network be synchronized without reference to an external time source?
Each computer in a distributed system has its own internal clock, which can be used by local
processes to obtain the value of the current time. Therefore two processes running on different
computers can each associate timestamps with their events. In a distributed system the problem
takes on more complexity because a global time is not easily known. The most used clock
synchronization solution on the Internet is the Network Time Protocol (NTP) which is a layered
client-server architecture based on UDP message passing. Lamport timestamps and vector
clocks are concepts of the logical clocks in distributed systems.
18.Define downloaded code
A CGI program runs at the server. Sometimes the designers of web services require some
service-related code to run inside the browser, at the user’s computer. In particular, code written
in Javascript is often downloaded with a web page containing a form, in order to provide better-
quality interaction with the user than that supported by HTML’s standard widgets.
19.Classify the security challenges faced by the distributed systems.
Denial of service attacks: It is a category of security problem is that a 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.
Security of mobile code: Mobile code needs to be handled with care. Consider someone who
receives an executable program as an electronic mail attachment: the possible effects of running
the program are unpredictable;
20. State the features in fault tolerance
 Detecting failure
 Masking failure
 Tolerating failure
 Recovery from failure
 Redundancy