EASWARI ENGINEERING COLLEGE

(An Autonomous Institution)

DEPARTMENT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING

191AIC303T DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
UNIT I INTRODUCTION
SYLLABUS:
Examples of Distributed Systems–Trends in Distributed Systems – Focus on resource
sharing – Challenges. Case study:World Wide Web.
REFERENCE:
George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore and Tim Kindberg,“Distributed Systems Concepts and
Design”,Fifth Edition, Pearson Education,2012.
1. INTRODUCTION
 A distributed system as one in which hardware or software components located at
networked computers communicate and coordinate their actions only by passing messages.
 Computers that are connected by a network may be spatially separated by any distance.
They may be on separate continents, in the same building or in the same room.
 Significant consequences of Distributed Systems:
 Concurrency: Systems connected in computer network does concurrent program
execution. I can do my work on my computer while you do your work on yours, sharing
resources such as web pages or files when necessary.
 No global clock: When programs need to cooperate they coordinate their actions by
exchanging messages. There are limits to the accuracy with which the computers in a
network can synchronize their clocks – there is no single global notion of the correct
time.
 Independent failures: Faults in the network result in the isolation of the computers that
are connected to it, but that doesn’t mean that they stop running. The programs on them
may not be able to detect whether the network has failed or has become unusually slow.
Similarly, the failure of a computer, or the unexpected termination of a program
somewhere in the system (a crash), is not immediately made known to the other
components with which it communicates.
 The prime motivation for constructing and using distributed systems is to share resources.
 Sharing resource extends from hardware components such as disks and printers to software
entities such as files, databases and data objects.
 1.1. EXAMPLES OF DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
 Key commercial and social applications highlighting some of the uses of distributed systems
technology.
 Finance and commerce: The growth of eCommerce by companies such as Amazon and
eBay, and underlying payments technologies such as PayPal; emerging online banking and
trading uses distributed systems for financial markets.
The information society: The growth of the World Wide Web as a repository of
information and knowledge; the development of web search engines such as Google and Yahoo
to search this vast repository; the emergence of digital libraries and the large-scale digitization.
Creative industries and entertainment: The emergence of online gaming and highly
interactive form of entertainment; the availability of music and film in the home through
networked media centres.
Healthcare: The increasing role of telemedicine in supporting remote diagnosis or more
advanced services such as remote surgery; the increasing application of networking and
embedded systems technology in assisted living, for example for monitoring the elderly in their
own homes.
Education: The emergence of e-learning through web-based tools such as virtual
learning environments; associated support for distance learning; support for collaborative or
community-based learning.
Transport and logistics: The use of location technologies such as GPS in route finding
systems and more general traffic management systems; the development of web-based map
services such as MapQuest, Google Maps and Google Earth.
Science: The emergence of the Grid as a fundamental technology for eScience, including
the use of complex networks of computers to support the storage, analysis and processing of
scientific data; Grid is used as an enabling technology for worldwide collaboration between
groups of scientists.
Environmental management: The use of sensor technology to both monitor and manage
the natural environment, for example to provide early warning of natural disasters such as
earthquakes, floods or tsunamis and to co-ordinate emergency response; helps in understanding
the complex natural phenomena such as climate change.
1.1.1 WEB SEARCH
 The task of a web search engine is to index the entire contents of the World Wide Web,
encompassing a wide range of information styles including web pages, multimedia sources
and (scanned) books.
 This is a very complex task, as current estimates state that the Web consists of over 63
billion pages and one trillion unique web addresses.
 Google, has designed distributed system infrastructure to support search in distributed
environment.
 Highlights of this infrastructure include:
• an underlying physical infrastructure consisting of very large numbers of
networked computers located at data centres all around the world
• a distributed file system designed to support very large files and heavily optimized
for the style of usage required by search and other Google applications
• an associated structured distributed storage system that offers fast access to very
large datasets
• a lock service that offers distributed system functions such as distributed locking
and agreement
• a programming model that supports the management of very large parallel and
distributed computations across the underlying physical infrastructure.
1.1.2 Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs)
 Massively multiplayer online games offer an immersive experience whereby 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.
 The number of players is rising, with systems able to support over 50,000 simultaneous
online players.
 The engineering of MMOGs represents a major challenge for distributed systems
technologies, particularly because of the need for fast response times to preserve the user
experience of the game.
 Other challenges include the real-time propagation of events to the many players and
maintaining a consistent view of the shared world.
A number of solutions have been proposed for the design of massively multiplayer online games:
• The largest online game, EVE Online, utilises a client-server architecture where a
single copy of the state of the world is maintained on a centralized server and accessed by client
programs running on players’ consoles or other devices. To support large numbers of clients, the
server is a complex entity in its own right consisting of a cluster architecture featuring hundreds
of computer nodes. The centralized architecture helps significantly in terms of the management
of the virtual world and the single copy also eases consistency concerns. The goal is then to
ensure fast response through optimizing network protocols and ensuring a rapid response to
incoming events. To support this, the load is partitioned by allocating individual ‘star systems’
to particular computers within the cluster, with highly loaded star systems having their own
dedicated computer and others sharing a computer. Incoming events are directed to the right
computers within the cluster by keeping track of movement of players between star systems.
• Other MMOGs adopt more distributed architectures where the universe is partitioned across a
number of servers that may also be geographically distributed. Users are then dynamically
allocated a particular server based on current usage patterns and also the network delays to the
server. This style of architecture, is adopted by EverQuest.
1.1.3 Financial trading
 The financial industry employs automated monitoring and trading applications.
 The important thing in such systems is communication and processing of items of interest,
known as events in distributed systems.
 Examples of such events include a drop in a share price, the release of the latest
unemployment figures, and so on.
 The system uses distributed event-based systems architecture.

Figure An example financial trading system

 There are series of event feeds coming into a given financial institution.
 Such event feeds share the following characteristics.
 The sources are in a variety of formats, such as Reuters market data events and FIX events
(events following the specific format of the Financial Information eXchange protocol), and
indeed from different event technologies.
 The problem of heterogeneity is encountered in most distributed systems.
 The use of adapters translates heterogeneous formats into a common internal format.
 The trading system must deal with a variety of event streams, all arriving at rapid rates, and
often requiring real-time processing to detect patterns that indicate trading opportunities.
 This used to be a manual process but competitive pressures have led to increasing
automation in terms of what is known as Complex Event Processing (CEP), which offers a
way of composing event occurrences together into logical, temporal or spatial patterns.
1.2. 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.
1.2.1 Pervasive networking and the modern Internet
 The modern Internet is a vast interconnected collection of computer networks of many
different types.

Figure A typical portion of the Internet

 Programs running on the computers connected to it interact by passing messages, employing

a common means of communication.
 The design and construction of the Internet communication mechanisms is a major technical
achievement, enabling a program running anywhere to address messages to programs
anywhere else.
 The Internet is also a very large distributed system. It enables users, wherever they are, to
make use of services such as the World Wide Web, email and file transfer.
 The set of services is open-ended – it can be extended by the addition of server computers
and new types of service.
 In intranets – subnetworks operated by companies and other organizations are protected by
firewalls.
 The role of a firewall is to protect an intranet by preventing unauthorized messages from
leaving or entering. A firewall is implemented by filtering incoming and outgoing messages.
 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are companies that provide broadband links and other
types of connection to individual users and small organizations, enabling them to access
services anywhere in the Internet as well as providing local services such as email and web
hosting.
 The intranets are linked together by backbones. A backbone is a network link with a high
transmission capacity, employing satellite connections, fibre optic cables and other high-
bandwidth circuits.

1.2.2 Mobile and ubiquitous computing

 Internet is now build into numerous small devices from laptops to watches.
 These devices must have high degree of portability. Mobile computing supports this.
 Mobile computing is the performances of computing tasks while the user dynamically
changing his geographic location.
 Ubiquitous computing (small computing ) means that all small computing devices will
eventually become so pervasive in everyday objects.
Differences between ubiquitous computing and mobile computing

Ubiquitous Computing Mobile Computing

They could connect tens/hundreds of They could connect a few devices for every
computing devices in every room/person, person, small enough to carry around – devices
becoming “invisible” and part of the connected to cellular networks orWLANs
environment – WANs, LANs, PANs –
networking in small spaces
They could connect even the non- mobile They are actually a subset of ubiquitous
devices and offer various forms of computing.
communication.

They could support all form of devices that They support only conventional, discrete
are connected to the internet from laptops to computers and devices.
watches.

Mobile devices in an environment

 The user in the above given environment has access to three forms of wireless connection:
 The laptop connecting to the host’s wireless LAN.
 Mobile (cellular) telephone connected to the Internet. The phone gives accessto
the Web and other Internet services.
 Digital camera that communicates over a personal area wireless network.
 This scenario demands associations between devices are routinely created and destroyed
called as spontaneous interoperation. This interoperation must be fast and convenient.

1.3.2 Distributed multimedia systems

 A distributed system supports the storage, transmission and presentation of discretemedia
types.
 A distributed multimedia system should be able to perform the same functions for
continuous media types such as audio and video.
 It should be able to store and locate audio or video files, to transmit them across the
network to support the presentation of the media types to the user and optionally also to
share the media types across a group of users.
 The processing of such media files includes handling of temporal dimensions and
integrity of media.
 The distributed multimedia computing allows a wide range of new multimedia services
and applications to be provided on the desktop.
 This includes access to live or pre-recorded television broadcasts, access to film libraries
offering video-on-demand services, access to music libraries, the provision of audio and
video conferencing facilities and integrated telephony features including IP telephony or
related technologies such as Skype, a peer-to- peer alternative to IP telephony .
 Webcasting is an application of distributed multimedia technology.

Webcasting is the ability to broadcast continuous media, typically audio or

video,over the Internet.

 Webcasting demands the following changes in the infrastructure:

 Support for an range of encoding and encryption formats.
 Support for range of mechanisms to ensure that the desired quality of servicecan
be met.
 Adaptability to associated resource management strategies.
 Providing adaptation strategies to deal with the situation where QOS is difficultto
achieve.
1.3.3 Distributed computing as a utility
 Distributed systems are seen as a utility like water and electricity.
 The resources are provided by appropriate service suppliers and effectively rentedby the
end user.
 The services may be physical or logical services.
 Physical resources such as storage and processing can be made available to networked
computers through data centres.
 Operating system virtualization is a key enabling technology that usersmay
actually be provided with services by a virtual rather than a physical node.
 Software services rental, services such as email and distributed calendars.
 Cloud computing is the child of resource sharing.

A cloud is defined as a set of Internet-based application, storage and computing

services sufficient to support most users’ needs, thus enabling them to largely or
totally dispense with local data storage and application softwarewith local data
storage and application software.

 Clouds are generally implemented on cluster computers.

 A cluster computer is a set of interconnected computers that cooperate closely to provide a
single, integrated high performance computing capability.
Cloud computing

1.4. RESOURCE SHARING

 An important goal of a distributed system is to effectively utilize the collective
resources of the system, namely, the memory and the processors of the individual
nodes.
 Users think in terms of shared resources such as a search engine without regard for
the server or servers that provide these.
 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.
 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 determine
what mechanisms the system must supply to coordinate users’ actions.
 The service manages a collection of related resources and presents their functionality
to users and applications.
 Resources in a distributed system are physically encapsulated within computers and
can only be accessed from other computers by means of communication.
 Sharing is done by a program that offers a communication interface enabling the
resource to be accessed and updated reliably and consistently.
 In a client server paradigm, server refers to a running program on a networked
computer that accepts requests from programs running on other computers to perform
a service and responds appropriately.
  The requesting processes are referred to as clients.
 A complete interaction between a client and a server, from the point when the client
sends its request to when it receives the server’s response, is called a remote
invocation.
CHALLENGES IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
a) Heterogeneity
Heterogeneity means the diversity of the distributed systems in terms of hardware,
software, platform, etc. Modern distributed systems will likely to be operating with
different:
 Hardware devices: computers, tablets, mobile phones, embedded devices, etc.
  Operating System: Ms Windows, Linux, Mac, Unix, etc.
 Network: Local network, the Internet, wireless network, satellite links, etc.
 Programming languages: Java, C/C++, Python, PHP, etc.
 Different roles of software developers, designers, system managers
 Middleware: 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. Eg: CORBA, RMI.
 Heterogeneity in mobile code: Mobile code is used to refer to program codethat
can be transferred from one computer to another and run at the destination.
Eg: Java applets.

Fig 1.5: Challenges in Distributed systems

b) Transparancy
Distributed systems designers must hide the complexity of the systems. Adding
abstraction layer is particularly useful in distributed systems. While users hit search in
google.com, they never notice that their query goes through a complex process before google
shows them a result. Some terms of transparency in distributed systems are:

Transparency Description

Access Hide differences in data representation and how a resource is accessed

Location Hide where a resource is located

Migration Hide that a resource may move to another location

Relocation Hide that a resource may be moved to another location while in use

Replication Hide that a resource may be copied in several places

Concurrency Hide that a resource may be shared by several competitive users

 Failure Hide the failure and recovery of a resource

Persistence Hide whether a (software) resource is in memory or a disk

The access and location transparency is collectively referred as network transparency.

c) Openness
If the well-defined interfaces for a system are published, it is easier for developers to
add new features or replace sub-systems in the future. Example: Twitter and Facebook have
API that allows developers to develop their software. The following are key points in
openness:
 key interfaces are published.
 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.
d) Concurrency
Distributed Systems usually is multi-users environment. In order to maximize
concurrency, resource handling components should anticipate as they will be accessed by
competing users. Concurrency prevents the system to become unstable when users compete to
view or update data.
e) Security
Every system must consider strong security measurement. Distributed Systems
somehow deals with sensitive information; so secure mechanism must be in place. The
foolowing attacks are more common in distributed systems:
 Denial of service attacks: When the requested service is not available at the time of
request it is Denial of Service (DOS) attack. This attack is done by bombarding the
service with a large number of useless requests that the serious users are unable to
use it.
 Security of mobile code: Mobile code needs to be handled with care since they
are transmitted in an open environment.
f) Scalability
Distributed systems must be scalable as the number of user increases.

A system is said to be scalable if it can handle the addition of users and

resources without suffering a noticeable loss of performance or increase in
administrative complexity.
 Scalability has 3 dimensions:
 Size: Number of users and resources to be processed. Problem associated with thisis
overloading.
 Geography: Distance between users and resources. Problem associated is
communication reliability
 Administration: As the size of distributed systems increases, many of the system
needs to be controlled. Problem associated is administrative mess
Scalability often conflicts with small system performance. Claim of scalability in such
system is often abused. The following are the scalability challenges:
 Controlling the cost of physical resources
 Controlling the performance loss
 Preventing software resources running out
 Avoiding performance bottlenecks
g) Resilience to Failure (Fault tolerance)
Distributed Systems involves a lot of collaborating components (hardware, software,
communication). So there is a huge possibility of partial or total failure. The failures are
handled in series of steps:
 Detecting failures: Some failures like checksum can be detected.
 Masking failures: Some failures that have been detected can be hidden or made less
severe. Examples of hiding failures include retransmission of messages and
maintaining a redundant copy of same data.
 Tolerating failures: All the failures cannot be handled. Some failures must be
accepted by the user. Example of this is waiting for a video file to be streamed in.
 Recovery from failures: Recovery involves the design of software so that the state
of permanent data can be recovered or rolled back after a server has crashed.
 Redundancy: Services can be made to tolerate failures by the use of redundant
components. Examples for this includes: maintenance of two different paths between
same source and destination.
 Availability is also a major concern in the fault tolerance. The availability of a
system is a measure of the proportion of time that it is available for use. It is a useful
performance metric.
h) Quality of Service:
The distributed systems must confirm the following non functional requirements:
  Reliability:A reliable distributed system is designed to be as fault tolerant as possible.
Reliability is the quality of a measurement indicating the degree to which the
measure is consistent.
 Security: Security is the degree of resistance to, or protection from, harm. It applies
to any vulnerable and valuable asset, such as a person, dwelling, community, nation,
or organization. Distributed systems spread across wide geographic locations. So
security is a major concern.
 Adaptability:The frequent changing of configurations and resource availability
demands the distributed system to be highly adaptable.
1.6. WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW)
1.6.1 History and Development of WWW
 The World Wide Web (WWW) can be viewed as a huge distributed system consisting
of millions of clients and servers for accessing linked documents.
 Servers maintain collections of documents, while clients provide users an easy to- use
interface for presenting and accessing those documents.
 The Web started as a project at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in
Geneva, to let its large and geographically dispersed group of researchers provide
access to shared documents using a simple hypertext system.
 A document in a WWW could be anything that could be displayed on a user’s
computer terminal, such as personal notes, reports, figures, blueprints, drawings, and
so on.
 By linking documents to each other, it became easy to integrate documents from
different projects into a new document without the necessity for centralized changes.
 The Web gradually grew worldwide encompassing sites other than high energy
physics, but popularity really increased when graphical user interfaces became
available, notably Mosaic (Vetter et al., 1994).
 Mosaic provided an easy-to-use interface to present and access documents by merely
clicking the mouse.
 A document was fetched from a server, transferred to a client, and presented on the
screen.
 To a user, there was conceptually no difference between a document stored locally or
in another part of the world. This is transparent distribution.
 Since 1994, Web developments are primarily initiated and controlled by the World
Wide Web Consortium, which is a collaboration between CERN and M.I.T.
  This consortium is responsible for standardizing protocols, improving interoperability,
and further enhancing the capabilities of the Web.
 The webpages are portable and open.
1.6.2 Components of WWW
 HTML
 The Web documents are expressed by means of a special language called HyperText
Markup Language (HTML).
 HTML provides keywords to structure a document into different sections.
 One of its most powerful features is the ability to express parts of a document in the
form of a script.
 When a document is parsed, it is internally stored as a rooted tree, called a parse
tree, in which each node represents an element of that document.
 Each node is required to implement a standard interface containing methods foraccessing
its content, returning references to parent and child nodes, and so on. This standard
representation is also known as the Document Object Model or DOM or dynamic
HTML.
 An alternative language that also matches the DOM is XML (Extensible Markup
Language).
 XML is used only to structure a document; it contains no keywords.
 XML can be used to define arbitrary structures. In other words, it provides the means
to define different document types.
Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The pages of a website can usually be accessed from a simple Uniform Resource
Locator (URL) otherwise called as web address.

 URL's are a way of identifying information on a server.

 A URL gives the protocol, the domain, the directory, and even the file.
 A URL consists of the following parts:
 protocol (such as http:// or ftp://)
 host name (the Web server's IP address or domain name)
 directory (i.e. folder)
 file name
There are two forms of URL as listed below:
  Absolute URL:
Absolute URL is a complete address of a resource on the web. This completed
address comprises of protocol used, server name, path name and file name.
Example: http:// www.abc.com / xyz /index.htm.
 http is the protocol.
 abc.com is the server name.
 index.htm is the file name.
The protocol part tells the web browser how to handle the file. Other protocols also
that can be used to create URL are: FTP, https, Gophe, mailto, news
 Relative URL
Relative URL is a partial address of a webpage. Unlike absolute URL, the protocol
and server part are omitted from relative URL. Relative URLs are used for internal links i.e.
to create links to file that are part of same website as the Web Pages on which you are placing
the link.

Example:

To link an image on abc.com/xyz/internet_referemce_models, we can use the relative

URL which can take the form like /internet_technologies/internet- osi_model.jpg.
Web servers and web browsers

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

 HTTP is a communication protocol.
 It defines mechanism for communication between browser and the web server. It is
also called request and response protocol because the communication between
browser and server takes place in request and response pairs.
 It is a stateless protocol (i.e.) the history of the communication between server and
client is not stored in any form.
HTTP Request
 HTTP request comprises of lines which contains: Request line, Header Fields and
Message body.
 The first line i.e. the Request line specifies the request method i.e. Get or Post.
 The second line specifies the header which indicates the domain name of the server
from where index.htm is retrieved.
HTTP Response
 Like HTTP request, HTTP response also has certain structure.
 HTTP response contains: Status line, Headers and Message body.

Publishing a resource:
 The methods for publishing resources on the Web are dependent upon the web server
implementation.
 The simplest method of publishing a resource on the Web is to place the
corresponding file in a directory that the web server can access.
 It is common for such concerns to be hidden from users when they generate content.
 The database or file system on which the product pages are based is transparent.
Downloaded code:
 The designers of web services require some service-related code to run inside the
browser, at the user’s computer.
 Javascript is an example for downloaded code.
 A Javascript enhanced page can give the user immediate feedback on invalid entries,
instead of forcing the user to check the values at the server, which would take much
longer.
 AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) is used in cases wheresynchronization
is not a major concern.
 Applet is also a form of downloaded code.
 It is an application which the browser automatically downloads and runs when it
fetches a corresponding web page.
Web services
 Web services allow exchange of information between applications on the web.
 Using web services, applications can easily interact with each other.
 The web services are offered using concept of Utility Computing.
 REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Define centralized computing.
The process of computation was started from working on a single processor. This uni-
processor computing can be termed as centralized computing.
2. Define distributed systems.
A distributed system is a collection of independent computers, interconnected via a
network, capable of collaborating on a task. Distributed computing is computing performed
in a distributed system.
3. List the features of Distributed Systems.
 Communication is hidden from users
 Applications interact in uniform and consistent way
 High degree of scalability
 A distributed system is functionally equivalent to the systems of which it is
composed.
 Resource sharing is possible in distributed systems.
 Distributed systems act as fault tolerant systems
 Enhanced performance
4. What are the issues in distributed systems?
 Concurrency
 Distributed system function in a heterogeneous environment. So adaptability isa
major issue.
 Latency
 Memory considerations: The distributed systems work on both local and shared
memory.
 Synchronization issues
 Applications must need to adapt gracefully without affecting other parts of the
systems in case of failures.
 Since they are widespread, security is a major issue.
 Limits imposed on scalability
 They are less transparent.
 Knowledge about the dynamic network topology is a must.
5. Mention the QOS parameters of DS.
The distributed systems must offer the following QOS:
 Performance
 Reliability
 Availability
 Security
6. Give the differences between centralized and distributed systems

Centralized Systems Distributed Systems

In Centralized Systems, several jobs are done In Distributed Systems, jobs are distributed among
on a particular central processing unit(CPU) several processors. The Processor are
interconnected by a computer network
They have shared memory and shared They have no global state (i.e.) no shared memory
variables. and no shared variables.

Clocking is present. No global clock.

7. What is distributed search?

Distributed search is a search engine model in which the tasks of Web crawling,
indexing and query processing are distributed among multiple computers and networks.
8. List the features of Google DS.
 The physical infrastructure with very large numbers of networked computers.
 Highly distributed file system that supports very large files.
 Availability of structured distributed storage system for fast access to data.
 Distributed locking and agreement.
 Works on a programming model that supports the management of large parallel and
distributed computations.
9. What is MMOG?
These games simulate real-life as much as possible. As such it is necessary to constantly
evolve the game world using a set of laws.These laws are a complex set of rules that the game
engine applies with every clock tick
10. What is CEP?
The Complex Event Processing (CEP) is an automatized way of composing event together
into logical, temporal or spatial patterns.
11. What is pervasive computing?
Pervasive computing devices are completely connected and constantly available.
12. Define ISP.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are companies that provide broadband links and other
types of connection to individual users and small organizations, enabling them to access
services anywhere in the Internet as well as providing local services such as email and web
hosting.
13. Define Ubiquitous computing .
Ubiquitous computing (small computing ) means that all small computing devices will
eventually become so pervasive in everyday objects.
14. Give the differences between ubiquitous computing and mobile computing

Ubiquitous Computing Mobile Computing

They could connect tens/hundreds of computing They could connect a few devices for every
devices in every room/person, becoming person, small enough to carry around – devices
“invisible” and part of the environment – WANs, connected to cellular networks orWLANs
LANs, PANs – networking in small spaces
They could connect even the non- mobile devices They are actually a subset of ubiquitous
and offer various forms of communication. computing.

They could support all form of devices that are They support only conventional, discrete
connected to the internet from laptops to computers and devices.
watches.

15. Define webcasting.

Webcasting is the ability to broadcast continuous media, typically audio or video, over the
Internet.
16. List the requirements of web casting.
Support for an range of encoding and encryption formats.
Support for range of mechanisms to ensure that the desired quality of service can be met.
Adaptability to associated resource management strategies.
Providing adaptation strategies to deal with the situation where QOS is difficult to achieve.
17. Define cloud.
A cloud is defined as a set of Internet-based application, storage and computing services
sufficient to support most users’ needs, thus enabling them to largely or totally dispense
with local data storage and application software with local data storage and application
software.
18. What is CSCW?
In computer-supported cooperative working (CSCW), a group of users who cooperate directly
share resources such as documents in a small, closed group.
19. Define remote invocation.
A complDEete interaction between a client and a server, from the point when the client
sends its request to when it receives the server’s response, is called a remote invocation.
20. List the challenges in DS.
Heterogeneity
Transparency
Openness
Concurrency
Security
Scalability
Fault tolerance
Providing QOS
21. What are the dimensions of scalability?
 Size: Number of users and resources to be processed. Problem associated with this is
overloading.
 Geography: Distance between users and resources. Problem associated is
communication reliability
 Administration: As the size of distributed systems increases, many of the systemneeds
to be controlled. Problem associated is administrative mess
22. List the challenges in scalability.
The following are the scalability challenges:
 Controlling the cost of physical resources
 Controlling the performance loss
 Preventing software resources running out
 Avoiding performance bottlenecks
23. Give the features in fault tolerance.
Detecting failures: Some failures like checksum can be detected.
Masking failures: Some failures that have been detected can be hidden or made less severe.
Examples of hiding failures include retransmission of messages and maintaining a redundant
copy of same data.
Tolerating failures: All the failures cannot be handled. Some failures must be accepted by
the user. Example of this is waiting for a video file to be streamed in.
Recovery from failures: Recovery involves the design of software so that the state of
permanent data can be recovered or rolled back after a server has crashed.
Redundancy: Services can be made to tolerate failures by the use of redundant components.
Examples for this includes: maintenance of two different paths between same source and
destination.
24. What is parse tree?
When a document is parsed, it is internally stored as a rooted tree, called a parse tree, in
which each node represents an element of that document.
25. Define URL.
The pages of a website can usually be accessed from a simple Uniform Resource Locator
(URL) otherwise called as web address.

PART – B
1. What are the issues in distributed systems?
2. Explain web search as a distributed system.
3. Brief about MMOGs.
4. Describe financial trading.
5. Explain the trends in distributed systems.
6. Elucidate the resource sharing nature of distributed system.
7. Brief about the challenges in distributed system.
8. Describe WWW.
9. Explain HTML.