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Advanced Operating System CSN-502: Design Issues (Distributed OS) Issue 1: Time in Distributed Systems

This document discusses several key issues in distributed operating systems, including ordering events without a global clock, capturing global system state, and mutual exclusion. It specifically focuses on Lamport's logical clocks for ordering events in a distributed system. Logical clocks assign timestamps to events, with the rule that if event a happens before b, a will have a lower timestamp than b. This establishes a partial causal ordering of events.

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36 views6 pages

Advanced Operating System CSN-502: Design Issues (Distributed OS) Issue 1: Time in Distributed Systems

This document discusses several key issues in distributed operating systems, including ordering events without a global clock, capturing global system state, and mutual exclusion. It specifically focuses on Lamport's logical clocks for ordering events in a distributed system. Logical clocks assign timestamps to events, with the rule that if event a happens before b, a will have a lower timestamp than b. This establishes a partial causal ordering of events.

Uploaded by

ishugupta0298
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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8/1/2023

Advanced Operating System


CSN-502

Design Issues (Distributed OS)


Issue 1: Time in Distributed Systems

Some Fundamental Problems

 Ordering events in the absence of a global clock


 Capturing the global state
 Mutual exclusion
 Leader election
 Clock synchronization
 Termination detection
 Agreement protocols

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Notion of Global Time

• Absence of Global Clock (Time)


 Assume a common clock
 Synchronize physical clocks

Absence of Global Time


 Scheduling processes (temporal order)
 Collecting up-to-date information on the state
of the system

Absence of shared memory


 A process in a distributed system can obtain a
coherent but partial view of the system or a
complete but incoherent view of the system

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Ordering of Events
Lamport’s Happened Before relationship:
For two events a and b, a → b if
a and b are events in the same process and a
occurred before b
a is a send event of a message m and b is the
corresponding receive event at the destination
process
a → c and c → b for some event c

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a → b implies a is a potential cause of b


Causal ordering : potential dependencies
“Happened Before” relationship causally orders
events
•If a → b, then a causally affects b
Concurrent events ( a || b)
•If a → b and b → a, then a and b are concurrent
For any two events in a system
•Either a → b, b → a or a || b

Lamport’s Logical Clocks


Each process i keeps a clock Ci.
 Each event a in i is timestamped Ci(a), the value
of Ci when a occurred
 Ci is incremented by d (d > 0) for each event in i
 In addition, if a is a send of message m from
process i to j, then on receive of m,
Cj = max(Cj, Ci(a)+d) //updated value of Cj

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Conditions satisfied by the system of clocks


 if a → b, then C(a) < C(b)
 For any two events a and b in a process i, if a occurs
before b then Ci(a) < Ci(b)
 If a is sending of a message m in i and b is receiving
of m at process j, then Ci(a) < Cj(b)
 → is an irreflexive partial order
 Total ordering (=>) possible by arbitrarily ordering
concurrent events by process numbers

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Limitation of Lamport’s Clock


a → b implies C(a) < C(b)
BUT
C(a) < C(b) doesn’t imply a → b !!
So not a true clock !!

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