DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING

Iftikhar Hussain Babur

System Analyst
Quaid-e-Azam Academy for Educational Development
Govt. of the Punjab, Wahdat Road Lahore
[email protected]

Superior University, Gold Campus

 Today’s Topic

Communication

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 Communication
• fundamental
• based on low-level message passing
• message passing is harder
• unreliable communication.
• development of large-scale distributed applications is
extremely difficult.

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 Fundamentals
Layered Approach
• sending and receiving(low level) messages.
• builds a message in its own address space.
• system call that causes the operating system to send the message.
• Protocols that were developed as part of the OSI model.
• useful for understanding computer networks.

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Self Reading / Research Task

Fundamentals

OSI Model, Lower-Level Protocols, Transport Protocols,

Higher-Level Protocols and Middleware Protocols
(page 117-124)

• Prepare yourself to present in front of the class as a group from

slides 5-14

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 Fundamentals
• Open system
• Rules
• Protocol agreement.
Two general types of protocols:
1. Connection oriented protocols
2. Connectionless protocols

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The OSI model
• seven levels or layers.
• one specific aspect of the communication.
• an interface.
• The interface consists of a set of operations that together define
the service, the layer is prepared to offer its users.

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The OSI model

Layer 7: Application Layer

• Provides means for the user.
• main interface for the user(s).
• Some examples of application layer protocols.
Layer 6: Presentation Layer
• Transforms data.
• MIME encoding, data compression, data encryption and
similar manipulation of the presentation.
• Examples:.

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The OSI model

Layer 5: Session Layer

• Controls the dialogues.
• establishes, manages, and terminates the connections.
• duplex or half-duplex operation.
Layer 4: Transport Layer
• Provides transparent transfer of data between end users.
• Controls the reliability of a given link.
• Some protocols are state and connection oriented.
• Best known example of a layer 4 protocol.

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The OSI model
Layer 3: Network Layer
• Provides the functional and procedural means of transferring
variable length data sequences.
• performs network routing functions.
• Routers operate at this
• logical addressing scheme
• The addressing scheme is hierarchical.
• The best known example of a layer 3 protocol

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The OSI model
Layer 2: Data Link Layer
• Provides the functional and procedural means to transfer data
between network entities and to detect and possibly correct errors
that may occur in the Physical layer.
• Best known example of this is Ethernet.
• Media Access Control (MAC) layer and the IEEE 802.2 Logical Link
Control (LLC) layer.
• Frames.
• bridges and switches operate.

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The OSI model
Layer 1: Physical Layer
• Defines all the electrical and physical specifications for
devices.
• This includes the layout of pins, voltages, and cable
specifications. Hubs, repeaters, network adapters and Host
Bus Adapters (HBAs used in Storage Area Networks) are
physical-layer devices.
• The major functions and services performed by the
physical layer are:
• Establishment and termination.
• Participation in the process.
• Modulation or conversion.

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Sending a message
When process A on machine 1 wants to communicate with process
B on machine 2:
1. builds a message and passes the message to the next layer
2. adds a header to the front of the message and passes the
resulting message to the next layer
3. Next layer adds its own header and passes the result down to the
next layer, and so on.
• Some layers add not only a header to the front, but also a trailer to
the end.
4. When it hits the bottom, the physical layer transmits the
message) by putting it onto the physical transmission medium.

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Sending a message
• A typical message as it appears on the network.

5. When the message arrives at machine 2, it is passed upward, with each

layer stripping off and examining its own header.
6. Finally, the message arrives at the receiver, process B, which may reply
to it using the reverse path.
• The information in the layer n header is used for the layer n protocol.

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Middleware Protocols
• Middleware
• Middleware communication protocols
support high-level communication
services.

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Types of Communication
• Viewing middleware as an intermediate (distributed) service in application-
level communication.

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Types of Communication

Example: An electronic mail system.

• The core of the mail delivery system viewed as a
middleware communication service.
• Each host runs a user agent allowing users to compose,
send, and receive e-mail.
• A sending user agent passes such mail to the mail
delivery system, expecting it, to deliver the mail to the
intended recipient.
• The user agent at the receiver's side connects to the mail
delivery system to see whether any mail has arrived.
• If so, the messages are transferred to the user agent so that
they can be displayed and read by the user.

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Persistent Communication
An electronic mail system is a typical example of communication
persistent communication.
• With persistent communication, a message that has been
submitted for transmission is stored by the communication
middleware as long as it takes to deliver it to the receiver.
• The middleware will store the message at one or several of the
storage facilities (above figure).
• Not necessary for the sending application to continue execution after
submitting the message.
• The receiving application need not be executing when the message is
submitted.

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Transient Communication
A message is stored by the communication system only as long as
the sending and receiving application are executing.
• The middleware cannot deliver a message if there is a
transmission interrupt or the recipient is currently not active
• it will discard the message.
• All transport-level communication services offer only transient
communication.
• The communication system consists of traditional store-and-forward routers.
• If a router cannot deliver a message to the next one or the destination host,
it will drop the message.

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Asynchronous & Synchronous Communication
Asynchronous Communication
A sender continues executing immediately after it has submitted its
message for transmission.
• This means that the message is (temporarily) stored by the middleware
immediately upon submission.
Synchronous Communication
A sender is blocked until its request is known to be accepted.
• Three points where synchronization can take place:
1. The sender may be blocked until the middleware notifies that it will
take over transmission of the request.
2. The sender may synchronize until its request has been delivered to
the intended recipient.
3. Synchronization may take place by letting the sender wait until its
request has been fully processed, that is, up the time that the
recipient returns a response.

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Types of Communication

• Various combinations of persistence and synchronization

occur in practice.
• Popular ones are persistence in combination with
synchronization at request submission, which is a
common scheme for many message-queuing systems.
• Likewise, transient communication with synchronization
after the request has been fully processed is also widely
used.
• This scheme corresponds with remote procedure calls
(RPC).

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Types of Communication

• Besides persistence and synchronization, we should also

make a distinction between discrete and streaming
communication.
• The examples so far all fall in the category of discrete
communication:
• the parties communicate by messages, each message
forming a complete unit of information.
• In contrast, streaming involves sending multiple
messages, one after the other, where:
• the messages are related to each other by the order they are
sent, or
• because there is a temporal relationship.

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Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Issue:
• Many distributed systems have been based on explicit message
exchange between processes.
• These procedures do not conceal communication mitigating access
transparency in distributed systems.
Solution:
• allowing programs to call procedures located on other machines.
• When a process on machine A calls a procedure on machine B, the
calling process on A is suspended, and execution of the called
procedure takes place on B.
• Information can be transported from the caller to the called
procedure in the parameters and be returned in the procedure
result.

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Basic RPC operation
• No message passing is visible to the programmer.
• This method is known as Remote Procedure Call, or often just
RPC.
Conventional Procedure Call
• Consider a call in C like
count = read(fd, buf, nbytes);
where
fd is an integer indicating a file
buf is an array of characters into which data are read
nbytes is another integer telling how many bytes to read

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Basic RPC operation

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Note

• In C, parameters can be call-by-value or call-by-

reference.
• A value parameter, such as fd or nbytes, is simply copied
to the stack as shown in Figure(b).
• To the called procedure, a value parameter is just an
initialized local variable.
• The called procedure may modify it, but such changes do
not affect the original value at the calling side.
• A reference parameter in C is a pointer to a variable (i.e.,
the address of the variable), rather than the value of the
variable.

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Message-oriented Communication
Message-oriented Transient Communication
• Message-oriented model using transport layer - transport-level
sockets
• Berkeley Sockets
• Used for point-to-point communications
• Supports broadcast
• Built for client/server development

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Socket primitives for TCP/IP

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Message-oriented Communication
The Message-Passing Interface (MPI)
• The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a library specification for message
passing.
• It is a standard API that can be used to create applications for high-
performance multicomputers.
• Specific network protocols (not TCP/IP)
• Message-based communication
• Primitives for all 4 forms of transient communication (+ variations)
• Over 100 functions

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Some of the message-passing primitives of MPI

• Further Reading
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/

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Message-oriented persistent communication
• Known as: “Message-queuing systems” or “Message-Oriented
Middleware (MOM)”.
• They support persistent, asynchronous communications.
• Typically, transport can take minutes (hours?) as opposed to
seconds/milliseconds.
• The basic idea: applications communicate by putting messages
into and taking messages out of “message queues”.
• Only guarantee: your message will eventually make it into the
receiver’s message queue.
• This leads to “loosely-coupled” communications.

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Basic interface to a queue in a message-queuing
system

Primitive Meaning

Put Append a message to a specified queue

Block until the specified queue is nonempty, and
Get
remove the first message
Poll Check a specified queue for messages, and remove
the first. Never block
Notify Install a handler to be called when a message is put
into the specified queue

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• Messages are “put into” a
source queue.
• They are then “taken from” a
destination queue.
• Queues are managed by queue
managers
• They move a message from a
source queue to a destination
queue.
• Special queue managers operate
as routers or relays: they forward
incoming messages to other queue The general organization of a message-
managers. queuing system with routers.

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Stream-oriented communication
• With RPC, RMI and MOM, the effect that time has on correctness
is of little consequence.
• However, audio and video are time-dependent data streams – if
the timing is off, the resulting “output” from the system will be
incorrect.
• Time-dependent information – known as “continuous media”
communications.
– Example: voice: PCM: 1/44100 sec intervals on playback.
– Example: video: 30 frames per second (30-40 msec per
image).
• KEY MESSAGE: Timing is crucial!

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Transmission Modes
• Asynchronous transmission mode – the data stream is transmitted
in order, but there’s no timing constraints placed on the actual
delivery (e.g., File Transfer).
• Synchronous transmission mode – the maximum end-to-end delay
is defined (but data can travel faster).
• Isochronous transmission mode – data transferred “on time” –
there’s a maximum and minimum end-to-end delay(known as
“bounded jitter”).
• Known as “streams” – isochronous transmission mode is very useful for
multimedia systems.

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Two Types of Streams

• Simple Streams – one single sequence of data, for

example: voice.
• Complex Streams – several sequences of data
(substreams) that are “related” by time.
• Think of a lip synchronized movie, with sound and pictures,
together with sub-titles …
• This leads to data synchronization problems … which are not at
all easy to deal with.

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A general architecture for streaming stored multimedia data over a network

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