UNIT 1 INTRODUCTION

Examples of Distributed Systems–Trends in Distributed Systems – Focus on resource

sharing – Challenges. Case study: World Wide Web.
A distributed system is one in which components located at networked computers
communicate and coordinate their actions only by passing messages. The components
interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal.

REAL TIME EXAMPLES OF DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

There are somes pecific examples of distributed systems to illustrate the diversity and
indeed complexity of distributed systems provision today.

Web Search
Web search has emerged as a major growth industry in the last decade, with recent
figures indicating that the global number of searches has risen to over 10 billion per
calendar month. The task of a web search engine is to index the entire contents of the
World Wide Web. This is a very complex task, as current estimates state that the Web
consists of over 63 billion pages and one trillion unique webaddresses. Given that most
search engines analyze the entire web content and then carry out sophisticated
processing on this enormous database, this task itself represents a major challenge for
distributed systems design.Google, the market leader in web search technology, has put
significant effort into the design of a sophisticated distributed system infrastructure to
support search
Highlights of this infrastructureinclude:
• an underlying physical infrastructure consisting of very large numbers ofnetworked
computers located at data centres all around the world;
• a distributed file system designed to support very large files and heavily optimizedfor
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 lockingand
agreement
• a programming model that supports the management of very large parallel
anddistributed computations across the underlying physical infrastructure.
Massive 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 also 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.
A number of solutions have been proposed for the design of massively multiplayer
online games:
1. Perhaps surprisingly, 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.
2. Other MMOGs adopt more distributed architectures where the universe is
partitioned across a (potentially very large) number of servers that may also be
geographically distributed.

Financial Trading
The financial industry has long been at the cutting edge of distributed systems
technology with its need, in particular, for real-time access to a wide range of
information sources.
Note that the emphasis in such systems is on the communication and processing of
items of interest, known as events in distributed systems, with the need also to deliver
events reliably and in a timely manner to potentially very large numbers of clients who
have a stated interest in such information items. Examples of such events include a drop
in a share price, the release of the latest unemployment figures, and so on. This requires
a very different style of underlying architecture from the styles mentioned above and
such systems typically employ what are known as distributed event-based systems.
This approach is primarily used to develop customized algorithmic trading strategies
covering both buying and selling of stocks and shares, in particular looking for patterns
that indicate a trading opportunity and then automatically responding by placing and
managing orders.
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
usermobility in distributed systems;
• the increasing demand for multimedia services;
• the view of distributed systems as a utility.

Pervasive networking and the modern Internet

The modern Internet is a vast interconnected collection of computer networks of
many different types, with the range of types increasing all the time and now including,
for example, a wide range of wireless communication technologies such as WiFi,
WiMAX, Bluetooth and third-generation mobile phone networks. The net result is that
networking has become a pervasive resource and devices can be connected at any time
and in any place.
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 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. A backbone is a network
link with a high transmission capacity, employing satellite connections, fibre optic
cables and other high-bandwidth circuits.

Mobile and ubiquitous computing

Technological advances in device miniaturization and wireless networking have led
increasingly to the integration of small and portable computing devices into distributed
systems. These devices include laptop computers, mobile phones, Personal Digital
Assistants(PDAs) etc.
The portability of many of these devices, together with their ability to connect
conveniently to networks in different places, makes mobile computing possible. Mobile
computing is the performance of computing tasks while the user is on the move, or
visiting places other than their usual environment. In mobile computing, users who are
away from their ‘home’ intranet (the intranet at work, or their residence) are still
provided with access to resources via the devices they carry with them. They can
continue to access the Internet; they can continue to access resources in their home
intranet; and there is increasing provision for users to utilize resources such as printers
or even sales points that are conveniently nearby as they move around. The latter is also
known as location-aware or context-aware computing. Mobility introduces a number of
challenges for distributed systems, including the need to deal with variable connectivity
and indeed disconnection, and the need to maintain operation in the face of device
mobility.
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. Ubiquitous and mobile computing overlap, since the mobile user can in
principle benefit from computers that are everywhere. But they are distinct, in general.
Ubiquitous computing could benefit users while they remain in a single environment
such as the home or a hospital. Similarly, mobile computing has advantages even if it
involves only conventional, discrete computers and devices such as laptops and
printers.

Distributed multimedia systems

Another important trend is the requirement to support multimedia services in
distributed systems. Multimedia support can usefully be defined as the ability to
support a range of media types in an integrated manner. One can expect a distributed
system to support the storage, transmission and presentation of what are often referred
to as discrete media types, such as pictures or text messages. 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 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 benefits
of distributed multimedia computing are considerable in that a wide range of new
services and applications can be provided on the desktop.
Webcasting is an application of distributed multimedia technology. Webcasting is the
ability to broadcast continuous media, typically audio or video, over the Internet.

Distributed computing as a utility

With the increasing maturity of distributed systems infrastructure, a number of
companies are promoting the view of distributed resources as a commodity or utility,
drawing the analogy between distributed resources and other utilities such as water or
electricity.
This model applies to both physical resources and more logical services:
Physical resources such as storage and processing can be made available to networked
computers, removing the need to own such resources on their own. At one end of the
spectrum, a user may opt for a remote storage facility for file storage requirements
and/or for backups.
Software services can also be made available across the global Internet using this
approach.
The term cloud computing is used to capture this vision of computing as a utility. A
cloud is defined as a set of Internet-based application, storage and computing services
sufficient to support most users’ needs, thusenabling them to largely or totally dispense
with local data storage and application software.

A cluster computer is a set of interconnected computers that cooperate closely to provide

a single, integrated high performance computing capability. The overall goal of cluster
computers is to provide a range of cloud services, including high-performance
computing capabilities, mass storage and richer application services such as web search.
FOCUS ON RESOURCE SHARING

Users are so accustomed to the benefits of resource sharing that they may
easilyoverlook their significance. We routinely share hardware resources such as
printers, dataresources such as files, and resources with more specific functionality such
as searchengines. In practice, patterns of resource sharing vary widely in their scope
and in how closely users work together.

At one extreme, 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. At the other extreme, 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
determines what mechanisms the system must supply to coordinate users’ actions.

The term service is used for a distinct part of a computer system that manages a
collection of related resources and presents their functionality to users and applications.
For example, we access shared files through a file service; we send documents to
printers through a printing service; we buy goods through an electronic payment
service. The only access we have to the service is via the set of operations that it exports.

For example, a file service provides read, write and delete operations on files. The
fact that services restrict resource access to a well-defined set of operations is in part
standard software engineering practice. But it also reflects the physical organization of
distributed systems. Resources in a distributed system are physically encapsulated
within computers and can only be accessed from other computers bymeans of
communication. For effective sharing, each resource must be managed by a program
that offers a communication interface enabling the resource to be accessed and updated
reliably and consistently.

CHALLENGES IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Major challenges faced in a distributed system are:
 Heterogeneity  Failure Handling
 Openness  Concurrency
 Security  Transparency
 Scalability  Quality of Service
Heterogeneity
The Internet enables users to access services and run applications over a heterogeneous
collection of computers and networks. Heterogeneity (that is, variety and difference)
applies to all of the following:
• networks;
• computer hardware;
• operating systems;
• programming languages;
• implementations by different developers.

The term 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. In addition to solving the problems of
heterogeneity, middleware provides a uniform computational model for use by the
programmers of servers and distributed applications. Possible models include remote
object invocation, remote eventnotification, remote SQL access and distributed
transaction processing.The term mobile code is used to refer to program code that can be
transferred from one computer to another and run at the destination – Java applets are
an example. Code suitable for running on one computer is not necessarily suitable for
running on another because executable programs are normally specific both to the
instruction set and to the host operating system.

The virtual machine approach provides a way of making code executable on a variety of
host computers: the compiler for a particular language generates code for a virtual
machine instead of a particular hardware order code. For example, the Java compiler
produces code for a Java virtual machine, which executes it by interpretation. The Java
virtual machine needs to be implemented once for each type of computer to enable Java
programs to run.

Openness
The openness of a computer system is the characteristic that determines whether the
system can be extended and reimplemented in various ways. The openness of
distributed systems is determined primarily by the degree to which new resource-
sharing services can be added and be made available for use by a variety of client
programs.
Systems that are designed to support resource sharing in this way are termed open
distributed systems to emphasize the fact that they are extensible. They may be
extendedat the hardware level by the addition of computers to the network and at the
softwarelevel by the introduction of new services and the reimplementation of old ones,
enablingapplication programs to share resources. A further benefit that is often cited for
opensystems is their independence from individual vendors.
In short,
• 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. But the conformance of each component to
the published standard must be carefully tested and verified if the system is to work
correctly.

Security
Many of the information resources that are made available and maintained in
distributedsystems have a high intrinsic value to their users. Their security is therefore
of considerable importance. Security for information resources has three components:
confidentiality , integrity and availability
In a distributed system, clients send requests to access data managed by servers, which
involves sending information in messages over a network.
For example:
1. A doctor might request access to hospital patient data or send additions to that data.
2. In electronic commerce and banking, users send their credit card numbers across the
Internet.
In both examples, the challenge is to send sensitive information in a message over a
network in a secure manner. But security is not just a matter of concealing the contents
of messages – it also involves knowing for sure the identity of the user or other agent on
whose behalf a message was sent. In the first example, the server needs to know that the
user is really a doctor, and in the second example, the user needs to be sure of the
identity of the shop or bank with which they are dealing. The second challenge here is
to identify a remote user or other agent correctly. Both of these challenges can be met by
the use of encryption techniques developed for this purpose.
Following two security challenges have not yet been fully met:
Denial of service attacks: Another 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.

Concurrency
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. To make this more concrete,
suppose that each resource is encapsulated as an object and that invocations are
executed in concurrent threads. In this case it is possible that several threads may be
executing concurrently within an object, in which case their operations on the object
may conflict with one another and produce inconsistent results. For example, if two
concurrent bids at an auction are ‘Smith: $122’ and ‘Jones: $111’, and the corresponding
operations are interleaved without any control, then they might get stored as ‘Smith:
$111’ and ‘Jones: $122’. The moral of this example is that any object that represents a
shared resource in a distributed system must be responsible for ensuring that it
operates correctly in a concurrent environment. This applies not only to servers but also
to objects in applications.

Therefore any programmer who takes an implementation of an object that was not
intended for use in a distributed system must do whatever is necessary to make it safe
in a concurrent environment. For an object to be safe in a concurrent environment, its
operations must be synchronized in such a way that its data remains consistent. This
can be achieved by standard techniques such as semaphores, which are used in most
operating systems.

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. The
implications of transparency are a major influence on the design of the system software.
The ANSA Reference Manual [ANSA 1989] and the International Organization for
Standardization’s Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) [ISO
1992] identify eight forms of transparency. We have paraphrased the original ANSA
definitions, replacing their migration transparency with our own mobility transparency,
whose scope is broader:
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 orsoftware
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.

The two most important transparencies are access and location transparency;
theirpresence or absence most strongly affects the utilization of distributed resources.
They are sometimes referred to together as network transparency.

Quality of Service

Once users are provided with the functionality that they require of a service, such as the
file service in a distributed system, we can go on to ask about the quality of the service
provided. The main nonfunctional properties of systems that affect the quality of the
service experienced by clients and users are reliability, security and performance.

Adaptability to meet changing system configurations and resource availability has been
recognized as a further important aspect of service quality.
Reliability and security issues are critical in the design of most computer systems. The
performance aspect of quality of service was originally defined in terms of
responsiveness and computational throughput, but it has been redefined in terms of
ability to meet timeliness guarantees, as discussed in the following paragraphs.

Some applications, including multimedia applications, handle time-critical data –

streams of data that are required to be processed or transferred from one process to
another at a fixed rate. For example, a movie service might consist of a client program
that is retrieving a film from a video server and presenting it on the user’s screen. For a
satisfactory result the successive frames of video need to be displayed to the user within
some specified time limits. In fact, the abbreviation QoS has effectively been
commandeered to refer to the ability of systems to meet such deadlines. Its achievement
depends upon the availability of the necessary computing and network resources at the
appropriate times.

Scalability:
Distributed systems operate effectively and efficiently at many different scales, ranging
from a small intranet to the Internet. A system is described as scalable if it will remain
effective when there is a significant increase in the number of resources and the number
of users. The number of computers and servers in the Internet has increased
dramatically.

The design of scalable distributed systems presents the following challenges:

Controlling the cost of physical resources: As the demand for a resource grows, it should be
possible to extend the system, at reasonable cost, to meet it. For example, the frequency
with which files are accessed in an intranet is likely to grow as the number of users and
computers increases. It must be possible to add server computers to avoid the
performance bottleneck that would arise if a single file server had to handle all file
access requests.

Controlling the performance loss: Consider the management of a set of data whose size is
proportional to the number of users or resources in the system – for example, the table
with the correspondence between the domain names of computers and their Internet
addresses held by the Domain Name System, which is used mainly to look up DNS
names such as www.amazon.com.
Preventing software resources running out: An example of lack of scalability is shown by
the numbers used as Internet (IP) addresses .

Avoiding performance bottlenecks: In general, algorithms should be decentralized to avoid

having performance bottlenecks. We illustrate this point with reference to the
predecessor of the Domain Name System, in which the name table was kept in a single
master file that could be downloaded to any computers that needed it. That was fine
when there were only a few hundred computers in the Internet, but it soon became a
serious performance and administrative bottleneck.

Failure Handling
Failures in a distributed system are partial – that is, some components fail while others
continue to function. Therefore the handling of failures is particularly difficult. The
following techniques for dealing with failures has been in implementation:

Detecting failures: Some failures can be detected. For example, checksums can be used to
detect corrupted data in a message or a file.

Masking failures: Some failures that have been detected can be hidden or made
lesssevere.
Two examples of hiding failures:
1. Messages can be retransmitted when they fail to arrive.
2. File data can be written to a pair of disks so that if one is corrupted, the other may
still be correct.

Tolerating failures: Most of the services in the Internet do exhibit failures – it would not
be practical for them to attempt to detect and hide all of the failures that might occur in
such a large network with so many components. Their clients can be designed to
tolerate failures, which generally involves the users tolerating them as well.

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. Consider the following examples:
1. There should always be at least two different routes between any two routers in the
Internet.
2. In the Domain Name System, every name table is replicated in at least twodifferent
servers.
3. A database may be replicated in several servers to ensure that the data remains
accessible after the failure of any single server; the servers can be designed to detect
faults in their peers; when a fault is detected in one server, clients are redirected to the
remaining servers.

Distributed systems provide a high degree of availability in the face of hardware faults.
The availability of a system is a measure of the proportion of time that it is available for
use. When one of the components in a distributed system fails, only the work that was
using the failed component is affected.

CASE STUDY: WORLD WIDE WEB

The World Wide Web is an evolving system forpublishing and accessing resources and
services across the Internet. Through commonlyavailable web browsers, users retrieve
and view documents of many types, listen toaudio streams and view video streams,
and interact with an unlimited set of services.The Web began life at the European center
for nuclear research (CERN),Switzerland, in 1989 as a vehicle for exchanging
documents between a community ofphysicists connected by the Internet [Berners-Lee
1999]. A key feature of the Web is thatit provides a hypertext structure among the
documents that it stores, reflecting the users’requirement to organize their knowledge.
This means that documents contain links (orhyperlinks) – references to other documents
and resources that are also stored in the Web.

The Web is an open system: it can be extended and implemented in new ways without
disturbing its existing functionality . First, its operation is based on communication
standards and document or content standards that are freely published and widely
implemented.Second, the Web is open with respect to the types of resource that can be
published and shared on it. At its simplest, a resource on the Web is a web page or
some other type of content that can be presented to the user, such as media files and
documents in Portable Document Format.

The Web has moved beyond these simple data resources to encompass services, such as
electronic purchasing of goods. It has evolved without changing its basic architecture.
The Web is based on three main standard technological components:
• the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), a language for specifying the contents and
layout of pages as they are displayed by web browsers;
• Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), also known as Uniform Resource Identifiers
(URIs), which identify documents and other resources stored as part of the Web;
• a client-server system architecture, with standard rules for interaction (the HyperText
Transfer Protocol – HTTP) by which browsers and other clients fetch documents and
other resources from web servers.

HTML
The HyperText Markup Language is used to specify the textand images that make up
the contents of a web page, and to specify how they are laidout and formatted for
presentation to the user. A web page contains such structured itemsas headings,
paragraphs, tables and images. HTML is also used to specify links andwhich resources
are associated with them.

URLs
The purpose of a Uniform Resource Locator is to identify a resource. Indeed, the term
used in web architecture documents is Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), but in this
book the better-known term URL will be used when no confusion can arise. Browsers
examine URLs in order to access the corresponding resources.HTTP URLs are the most
widely used, for accessing resources using the standardHTTP protocol. An HTTP URL
has two main jobs: to identify which web servermaintains the resource, and to identify
which of the resources at that server is required.
HTTP
The HyperText Transfer Protocol defines the ways in which browsers and other types of
client interact with web servers.
Request-reply interactions: HTTP is a ‘request-reply’ protocol. The client sends a request
message to the server containing the URL of the required resource. The server looks up
the path name and, if it exists, sends back the resource’s content in a reply message to
the client. Otherwise, it sends back an error response such as the familiar ‘404 Not
Found’. HTTP defines a small set of operations or methods that can be performed on a
resource. The most common are GET, to retrieve data from theresource, and POST, to
provide data to the resource.

Content types: Browsers are not necessarily capable of handling every type of content.
When a browser makes a request, it includes a list of the types of content it prefers – for
example, in principle it may be able to display images in ‘GIF’ format but not ‘JPEG’
format.