DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING – UNIT WISE QUESTIONS AND ANSWER

COURSE CODE: CS3551

REGULATION:2021

UNIT-1
PART-A
1) What are the Design issues of Distributed system?
∙ Openness
∙ Resource Sharing
∙ Concurrency
∙ Scalability
∙ Fault-Tolerance
∙ Transparency
∙ High-Performance
2) Write the issues arising from Distributed Systems?
∙ Naming - How to uniquely identify resources.
∙ Communication - How to exchange data and information reliably with good performance.
∙ Software Structure - How to make software open, extensible, scalable, with high-performance.
∙ Workload Allocation - Where to perform computations and various services. ∙ Consistency
Maintenance - How to Keep consistency at a reasonable cost.
3) What is Communication in Distributed Systems?
Communication is an essential part of distributed systems - e.g., clients and servers must
communicate for request and response. Communication normally involved - transfer of data
from sender to receiver - synchronization among processes.
4) What are types of Communication in Distributed Systems ?
∙ Client-Server
∙ Group Multicast
∙ Function Shipping
∙ Performance of distributed systems depends critically on communication performance
Distributed System Software Structure
∙ It must be easy to add new services (flexibility, extensibility, openness requirements) ∙ Kernel is
normally restricted to
∙ memory allocation
∙ process creation and scheduling
∙ interposes communication
5) List any two resources of hardware and software, which can be shared in distributed
systems with example. (NOV 2017)
Hardware – Printer, Disks, Fax machine, Router, Modem.
Software – Application Programs, Shared Files, Shared Databases, Documents, Services.
6) State the objectives of resurce sharing model APRIL/MAY 2018
 resources are made available
 resources can be used
 service provider and user interact with each other
 accessing remote resources
 sharing them in a controlled and efficient way
7) Write down the Principles of distributed systems?
The principles of distributed computing, emphasizing the fundamental issues underlying the
design of distributed systems and networks: communication, coordination, fault tolerance,
locality, parallelism, self-organization,
8) What is clock skew and clock drift?
The instantaneous difference between the readings of any two clocks is called their skew. Clock
drift means that they count time at different rates, and so diverge
9) What is clocks drift rate?
A clock’s driftrate is the change in the offset (difference in reading) between the clock and P a
nominal perfect reference clock per unit of time measured by the reference clock.
10) What are the two modes of synchronization? Write their format?
The two modes are:
External synchronization:
In order to Know at what time of day events occur at the processes in our distributed system –
for example, for accountancy purposes – it is necessary to synchronize the processes’ clocks, Ci ,
with an authoritative, external source of time. This is externalsynchronization
For a synchronization bound D>0, and for a source S of UTC time,|S(t) –Ci(t)|<T, for i=1,2,…N
and for all real times t in I. Internal synchronization:
If the clocks Ci are synchronized with one another to a Known degree of accuracy, then we can
measure the interval between two events occurring at different computers by appealing to their
local clocks, even though they are not
necessarily synchronized to an external source of time. This is internal synchronization. Fora
synchronization bound D>0,|Ci(t)-Cj(t)|<D,
for i,j=1,2,…N. and for all real times t in I.
11) Explain Faultry and Crash Failure.
A clock that does not Keep to whatever correctness conditions apply is defined to be faulty.
A clock’s crash failure is said to occur when the clock stops ticKing altogether;any other clock
failure is an arbitrary failure. A historical example of an arbitrary failure is that of a clock with
the ‘Y2K bug’, which broKe the monotonicity condition by registering the date after 31
December 1999 as 1 January 1900 instead of 2000; another example is a clock
whose batteries are very low and whose drift rate suddenly becomes very large
12) How the clock synchronization done in
Cristian’s method?
A single time server might fail, so they suggest the use of a group of synchronized servers It does
not deal with faulty servers
13) Explain Logical time and logical clocks.
Logical time
Lamport proposed a model of logical time that can be used to provide an ordering among the
events at processes running in different computers in a distributed system.Logical time allows
the order in which the messages are presented to be inferred without recourse to clocks.
Logical clocks • Lamport invented a simple mechanism by which the happenedbefore ordering
can be captured numerically, called a logical clock. A Lamport logical clock is a ncreasing
software counter, whose value need bear no particular relationship to any physical clock.
Each process pi Keeps its own logical clock, Li , which it uses to apply so- called Lamport
timestamps to events. We denote the timestamp of event e at pi by Li(e) , and by L(e) we denote
the timestamp of event e at
whatever process it occurred at.
14) What is vector clock? Explain.
Vector clocks • Mattern and Fidge developed vector clocks to overcome the shortcoming of
Lamport’s clocks: the fact that from L(e)<L(e’)we cannot conclude that e ->e’
A vector clock for a system of N processes is an array of Nintegers. Each process Keeps its own
vector clock, Vi , which it uses to timestamp local events. Like Lamport timestamps, processes
piggybacK vector timestamps on the messages they send to one another, and there are simple
rules for updating the clocks:
TaKing the componentwise maximum of two vector timestamps in this way is Known as a merge
operation.
15) Explain global states and consistent cuts with example.
Global state of a distributed system consists of
–Local stateof each process: messages sent and messages received
–State of each channel:messages sent but not
received
16) State the issues in Clocks.
The Importance of Accurate Time on Computer Networks. The synchronization of time on
computers and networks is often vitally important. Without it, the time on individual computers
will slowly drift away from each other
at varying degrees until potentially each has a significantly different time

UNIT-II
PART-A
1) What is meant by group communication?
Group communication is a multicast operation is more appropriate- this is an operation that sends
a single message from one process to each of the members of a group of process, usually in such
a way that the membership of the group is transparent
to the sender.
OR APP
2) Difference between synchronous and asynchronous communication?
In synchronous form of communication, the sending and receiving processes synchronize at
every message. In this case, both send and receive are blocking operations. Whenever a send is
issued the sending process is blocked until the corresponding receive is issued. Whenever receive
is issued, the process blocks until a message arrives.
In asynchronous form of communication, the use of the send operation is non-blocking in that
the sending process is allowed to proceed as soon as the message has been copied to a local
buffer and the transmission of the message proceeds in parallel with the sending process. The
receive operation can
have blocking and non-blocking variants.
3) What are the forms of message ordering paradigms?
∙ FIFO
∙ non-FIFO
∙ Casual order
∙ Synchronous order
4) What are the characterisitics of group communication?
∙ Fault tolerance based on replicated server
∙ Finding the discovery servers from spontaneous networks
∙ Better performance through replicated data
∙ Propagation of event notification
5) What are the two phases in obtaining a global snapshot?
∙ First locally recording the snapshot at every process
∙ Second distributing the resultant global snapshot to all the initiators
6) What are the two optimization techniques are provided to the Chandy-Lamport
algorithm?
∙ The first optimization combines snap-shots concurrently initiated by multiple processes into a
single snapshot.
∙ This optimization is linked with the second optimization,which deals with the efficient
distribution of the global snapshot.
7) How a FIFO execution is implemented?
∙ To implement a FIFO logical channel over a non-FIFO channel,a separate numbering scheme is
used to sequence the messages.
∙ The sender assigns a sequence number and appends connection_id to each message and then
transimmted then the receiver arranges the incoming messages according to the sender’s
sequence numbers and accepts “next” message s per sequence.
8) What is Guard?
A Guard Gi is a Boolean expression.If a Guard Gi evaluates to true then CLi is said to be enabled
otherwise it is diabled.
9) List the criteria to be met by a casual ordering protocol.
∙ Safety
∙ Liveliness
10) Write the drawback of centralized algorithm.
∙ Single point of failure
∙ Congestion
11) List the application of Casual order protocol.
∙ Updating replicated data,
∙ Allocating requests in a fair manner
∙ Synchronizing multimedia streams
12) What is the purpose of Chandy and Lamport algorithm?
∙ Chandy and Lamport proposed a snapshot algorithm for determining global states of distributed
systems.
∙ This algorithm records a set of process and channels as a snapshot for the process set.
The recorded global state is consistent.

UNIT-3

PART-A
1) What is distributed deadlock? Explain with example.
With deadlock detection schemes, a transaction is aborted only when it is involved in a deadlock.
Most deadlock detection schemes operate by finding cycles in the transaction wait- for graph. In
a distributedsystem involving multiple servers being accessed by multiple transactions, a global
wait-for graph can in theory be constructed from the local ones. There can be a cycle in the
global wait-for graph that is not in any single local one – that is, there can be a distributed
deadlock
2) Explain the ‘snapshot’ algorithm of Lamport.
The ‘snapshot’ algorithm of Chandy and Lamport describe a ‘snapshot’ algorithm for
determining global states of distributed systems, which we now present. The goal of the
algorithm is to record a set of process and channel states (a ‘snapshot’) for a set of processes pi( i
= 1,2,.N ) such that, even though the combination of recorded states may never have occurred at
the same time, the recorded global state is consistent
3) Explain phantom deadlocks.
A deadlock that is 'detected' but is not really a deadlock is called phantom deadlock. In
distributed deadlock detection, information about wait-for relationships between transactions is
transmitted from on server to another. If there is a deadlock, the necessary information will
eventually be collected in one place and a cycle will be detected. Ja this procedure will take
some time, there is a chance that one of the transactions
that Holds a lock will meanwhile have released it, in which case the deadlock will no longer
exist.
4) Explain edge chasing deadlock detection technique in distributed systems.
A distributed approach to deadlock detection uses a technique called edge chasing or path
pushing. In this approach, the global wait-for graph is not constructed, but each of the servers
involved has Knowledge about some of its edges.
The servers attempt to find cycles by forwarding messages called probes, which follow the edges
of the graph throughout the distributed system. A probe message consists of transaction wait-for
relationships representing a path in the global
wait-for graph.
5) Define Distributed Mutual Exclusion.
A condition in which there is a set of processes ,only one of which is able to access a given
resource or perform a given function at a time.
6) Compare Deadlock and Starvation
∙ Deadlock happens when two or more process indefinitely gets stopped when it attempts to enter
or exit the critical section
∙ Starvation is the indefinite postponement of entry for a process that has requested it.Without
Deadlock Starvation may also occur. No starvation leads to fairness condition.
7) What are the approaches to implement distributed mutual exclusion.
∙ Token based approach
∙ Non Token based approach
∙ Quorum based approach
8) What are the three states of Mutual Exclusion?
It is of three states
1.Requesting Control Section
2.Executing Control Section
3.Or Neither requesting nor executing control section(idle)
9) Define Throughput.
 The rate at which the system executes request for the critical section if synchronization delay is
SD and E is the average critical section execution time,then the throughput is given by the
equation
System Throughput=1/(SD+E)
10) Define Response time.
The time interval is the request wait for its control section execution to be over after its request
message have been sent out .It does not include the time request waits at a site before its request
message have been sent out.

UNIT-4

PART-A
1) Define Roll back recovery?
Roll back recovery is defines as a system recovers correctly if its internal state is consistent with
the observable behavior of the system before the failure.
2) What is a local checkpoint?
A local checkpoint is a snapshot of the state of the process at a given instance and the event of
recording the state of a process is called local check pointing.
3) What are the types of messages in recovery?
In-transit messages
Lost messages
Delayed messages
Orphan messages
Duplicate messages
4) What is an Orphan message?
Messages with receive recorded but message send not recorded are called orphan messages.
Classify the checkpoint-based rollback recovery techniques.
∙ Uncoordinated check pointing
∙ Coordinated check pointing
∙ Communication induced check pointing
5) What is the necessity of Uncoordinated check pointing?
Each process takes its checkpoints independently. This eliminates the synchronization overhead.
6) What are the types of communication-induced check pointing?
∙ Model-based check pointing
∙ Index-based check pointing
7) What are the advantages of pessimistic logging?
∙ Immediate output commit
∙ Restart from most recent checkpoint
∙ Recovery limited to failed process
∙ Simple garbage collection
8) State the role of Index-based checkpointing.
Index based communication-induced check pointing assigns monotonically increasing indexes to
checkpoints, such that the checkpoints having the same index at different processes from a
consistent state.
9) What are the types of rollback-recovery protocols?
∙ Pessimistic logging,
∙ Optimistic logging
∙ Causal logging protocols
10) Compare agreement problem and the consensus problem
The difference between the agreement problem and the consensus problem is that in the
agreement problem, a single process has the initial value, whereas in the consensus problem,all
processes have an initial value.
11) Write about Reliable Broadcast (RTB)
∙ RTB requires recognition of a failure,even if no message is sent.
∙ It is required to distinguish between a failed process and a slow process ∙ RTB requires eventual
delivery of messages, even if sender fails before sending. In this case, a null message needs to
get sent. In RB, this condition is not there.
 UNIT-5
PART-A

1) What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a model of delivering computing services over the internet, where resources
such as servers, storage, and applications are provided as a service to users on-demand. (3 marks)

2) What are the benefits of cloud computing?

The benefits of cloud computing include scalability, flexibility, cost savings, and increased
reliability. (3 marks)

3) What is the difference between public and private cloud?

Public cloud is a cloud that is open to the general public, while private cloud is a cloud that is
owned and managed by a single organization. (3 marks)
4) What is cloud migration?

Cloud migration is the process of moving data, applications, or other business elements from a
local data center to a cloud environment. (3 marks)

5) What is cloud security?

Cloud security refers to the practices and technologies used to protect cloud data, applications,
and infrastructure from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or
destruction. (3 marks)

6) What is cloud management?

Cloud management refers to the process of managing cloud resources, including provisioning,
monitoring, and optimizing cloud services. (3 marks)

7) What is cloud orchestration?

Cloud orchestration refers to the process of automating the provisioning and management of
cloud resources, including servers, storage, and applications. (3 marks)

8) What is serverless computing?

Serverless computing is a cloud computing model in which the cloud provider manages the
infrastructure and dynamically allocates computing resources as needed. (3 marks)

9) What is containerization?
Containerization is a lightweight alternative to virtualization that allows multiple applications to
run on a single host operating system. (3 marks)

10) What is cloud storage?

Cloud storage is a model of data storage in which data is stored and accessed over the internet,
rather than on local devices. (3 marks)

11) What is big data analytics in cloud computing?

Big data analytics in cloud computing refers to the process of analyzing large amounts of data in
a cloud environment to gain insights and make better business decisions. (3 marks)

12) What is cloud disaster recovery?

Cloud disaster recovery refers to the process of using cloud resources to recover data and
applications in the event of a disaster or outage. (3 marks)

13) What is cloud compliance?

Cloud compliance refers to the process of ensuring that cloud resources and data are compliant
with relevant laws, regulations, and industry standards. (3 marks)

14) What is cloud-based IoT?

Cloud-based IoT refers to the use of cloud resources to connect, manage, and analyze data from
internet of things (IoT) devices. (3 marks)
15) What is cloud-based AI?
Cloud-based AI refers to the use of cloud resources to build, deploy, and manage artificial
intelligence (AI) applications. (3 marks)

16) What is cloud bursting?

Cloud bursting refers to the process of using cloud resources to supplement local resources
during periods of high demand. (3 marks)

17) What is cloud federation?

Cloud federation refers to the process of connecting multiple cloud environments to enable data
and application portability. (3 marks)

18) What is cloud brokerage?

Cloud brokerage refers to the process of acting as an intermediary between cloud providers and
customers to negotiate prices and services. (3 marks)

19) What is cloud auditing?

Cloud auditing refers to the process of evaluating cloud resources and data to ensure compliance
with relevant laws, regulations, and industry standards. (3 marks)

20) What is cloud encryption?

Cloud encryption refers to the process of protecting cloud data by converting it into a code that
can only be deciphered with the appropriate decryption key. (3 marks)