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Abstract On Challenges in Distributed Systems

This document discusses various issues in distributed systems. It outlines 7 key topics: 1) distributed systems must be fault tolerant, 2) they have an asynchronous nature due to clock synchronization problems, 3) they require reliable communication, 4) they must deal with various software failures, 5) they must solve computational problems related to graphs, 6) they need effective security mechanisms to deal with threats like interception and modification, and 7) they face concurrency problems around using shared resources and ordering of updates. The dissertation will cover these issues in distributed systems in detail.

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Neha Sharma
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25 views

Abstract On Challenges in Distributed Systems

This document discusses various issues in distributed systems. It outlines 7 key topics: 1) distributed systems must be fault tolerant, 2) they have an asynchronous nature due to clock synchronization problems, 3) they require reliable communication, 4) they must deal with various software failures, 5) they must solve computational problems related to graphs, 6) they need effective security mechanisms to deal with threats like interception and modification, and 7) they face concurrency problems around using shared resources and ordering of updates. The dissertation will cover these issues in distributed systems in detail.

Uploaded by

Neha Sharma
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ABSTRACT

Distributed computing is a field of Computer system that studies distributed systems. A


distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a
computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal.

It is originally referred to computer networks where individual computers were physically


distributed within some geographical area. There are several autonomous computational
entities, each of which has its own local memory. The entities communicate with each other by
message passing

In this dissertation, we will discuss about the” Various Issues of Distributed Systems”.

1. System should be fault tolerant:


Our goal is to design a distributed system with the characteristics like fault-tolerant,
highly available, recoverable which means we must design for failure. To design for
failure, we must be careful to not make any assumptions about the reliability of the
components of a system Failure recovery is often the most important aspect of security
engineering, yet is one of the most neglected.

Under this we will discuss


a) Failure Models
b) What Is Resilience For?
c) At What Level Is the Redundancy?
d) Service Denial Attacks

2. Asynchronous nature of distributed systems:


Clock synchronization is a problem from computer science and engineering which deals
with the idea that internal clocks of several computers may differ. Even when initially set
accurately, real clocks will differ after some amount of time due to clock drift, caused by
clocks counting time at slightly different rates. There are several problems that occur as
a repercussion of rate differences and several solutions, some being more appropriate
than others in certain contexts.
 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

a) Cristian's algorithm
b) Berkeley algorithm
c) Clock Sampling Mutual Network Synchronization
d) Precision Time Protocol
3. Should support Reliable communication.
a) In the analysis of distributed algorithms, more attention is usually paid on
communication operations than computational steps. Perhaps the simplest model of
distributed computing is a synchronous system where all nodes operate in a lockstep
fashion. During each communication round, all nodes in parallel (1) receive the latest
messages from their neighbours, (2) perform arbitrary local computation, and
(3) send new messages to their neighbours. In such systems, a central complexity
measure is the number of synchronous communication rounds required to complete
the task

b) Other commonly used measures are the total number of bits transmitted in the
network (cf. communication complexity).

Two ways of communication possible are:

a) Trough TCP/IP protocol


b) Remote procedure calls

4. Dealing various software failures:


Types of failures that can occur in a distributed system:

 Halting failures: A component simply stops. There is no way to detect the failure except
by timeout: it either stops sending "I'm alive" (heartbeat) messages or fails to respond to
requests. Your computer freezing is a halting failure.
 Fail-stop: A halting failure with some kind of notification to other components. A network
file server telling its clients it is about to go down is a fail-stop.
 Omission failures: Failure to send/receive messages primarily due to lack of buffering
space, which causes a message to be discarded with no notification to either the sender
or receiver. This can happen when routers become overloaded.
 Network failures: A network link breaks.
 Network partition failure: A network fragments into two or more disjoint sub-networks
within which messages can be sent, but between which messages are lost. This can
occur due to a network failure.
 Timing failures: A temporal property of the system is violated. For example, clocks on
different computers which are used to coordinate processes are not synchronized; when
a message is delayed longer than a threshold period, etc.

5. Should solve Computational problems:

Many tasks that we would like to automate by using a computer are of question–answer
type: we would like to ask a question and the computer should produce an answer. In
theoretical computer science, such tasks are called computational problems. Formally, a
computational problem consists of instances together with a solution for each instance
In the case of distributed algorithms, computational problems are typically related to
graphs.

6. Effective secure system:

We will see how people can authenticate themselves to systems(and systems can
authenticate themselves to each other) using security protocols; how access controls
can be used to manage which principals can perform which operations in a system; and
some of the mechanics of how crypto can be used to underpin access control in
distributed systems. But there’s much more to building a secure distributed systems than
just implementing access controls, protocols, and crypto.These issues are central to the
design of effective secure systems.
Types of threats can be:
• Interception
• Interruption
• Modification
• Fabrication

Varios security mechanisms:

• Encryption
• Authentication
• Authorization
• Auditing

7. Concurrency problem:
There are also problems where we do not want the system to ever stop. Examples of such
problems include the dining philosophers problem and other similar mutual exclusion
problems. In these problems, the distributed system is supposed to continuously coordinate
the use of shared resources so that no conflicts or deadlocks occur. Processes are said to
be concurrent if they run at the same time, and concurrency gives rise to a number of well-
studied problems. Processes may use old data; they can make inconsistent updates; the
order of updates may or may not matter; the system might deadlock; the data in different
systems might never converge to consistent values; and when it’s important to know the
exact time. Programming concurrent systems is a hard problem in general. So we will
discuss about:

a) Using Old Data versus Paying to Propagate State

b) Locking to Prevent Inconsistent Updates

c) Order of Updates

d) Deadlock

e) Non-convergent State
f) Secure Time

So, we will discuss about all this, and will see to it that how these above mentioned topics play
an important role in case of distributed systems. A distributed system should be able to handle
every typical situation it comes across, but there various problems which a distributed system
has to face. So, in this dissertation all such problems will be covered in detail.

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