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CS3551 unit 1 Notes - none

Distributed computing (Anna University)

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CS3551-DISTRUBUTED COMPUTING (Reg 2021)

UNIT I INTRODUCTION

Introduction: Definition –Relation to computer system components –Motivation –Message-

passing systems versus shared memory systems –Primitives for distributed communication –
Synchronous versus asynchronous executions –Design issues and challenges. A model of
distributed computations: A distributed program –A model of distributed executions –Models
of communication networks –Global state.

1.INTRODUCTION

The process of computation was started from working on a single processor. This uni-
processor computing can be termed as centralized computing. As the demand for the
increased processing capability grew high, multiprocessor systems came to existence. The
advent of multiprocessor systems, led to the development of distributed systems with high
degree of scalability and resource sharing. The modern day parallel computing is a subset of
distributed computing

A distributed system is a collection of independent computers, interconnected via

a network, capable of collaborating on a task. Distributed computing is
computing performed in a distributed system.

A distributed system is a collection of independent entities that cooperate to solve a problem

that cannot be individually solved. Distributed computing is widely used due to
advancements in machines; faster and cheaper networks. In distributed systems, the entire
network will be viewed as a computer. The multiple systems connected to the network will
appear as a single system to the user. Thus the distributed systems hide the complexity of the
underlying architecture to the user. Distributed computing is a special version of parallel
computing where the processors are in different computers and tasks are distributed to
computers over a network.
The definition of distributed systems deals with two aspects that:
Deals with hardware: The machines linked in a distributed system are autonomous.
Deals with software: A distributed system gives an impression to the users that they are
dealing with a single system.

Features of Distributed Systems:

No common physical clock - This is an important assumption because it introduces the
element of “distribution” in the system and gives rise to the inherent asynchrony amongst
the processors.
No shared memory - A key feature that requires message-passing for communication. This
feature implies the absence of the common physical clock.
Geographical separation – The geographically wider apart that the processors are, the
more representative is the system of a distributed system.

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Autonomy and heterogeneity – Here the processors are “loosely coupled” in that they have
different speeds and each can be running a different operating system.

Issues in distributed systems

Heterogeneity
Openness
Security
Scalability
Failure handling
Concurrency
Transparency
Quality of
service

QOS parameters
The distributed systems must offer the following QOS:
 Performance

 Reliability

 Availability

 Security

Differences between centralized and distributed systems

Centralized Systems Distributed Systems
In Centralized Systems, several jobs are done In Distributed Systems, jobs are distributed
on a particular central processing unit(CPU) among several processors. The Processor are
interconnected by a computer network
They have shared memory and shared They have no global state (i.e.) no shared
variables. memory and no shared variables.
Clocking is present. No global clock.

Relation to Computer System Components

Fig 1.1: Example of a Distributed System

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As shown in Fig 1.1, Each computer has a memory-processing unit and the computers are
connected by a communication network. Each system connected to the distributed networks
hosts distributed software which is a middleware technology. This drives the Distributed
System (DS) at the same time preserves the heterogeneity of the DS. The term computation
or run in a distributed system is the execution of processes to achieve a common goal.

Fig 1.2: Interaction of layers of network

The interaction of the layers of the network with the operating system and
middleware is shown in Fig 1.2. The middleware contains important library functions for
facilitating the operations of DS.
The distributed system uses a layered architecture to break down the complexity of system
design. The middleware is the distributed software that drives the distributed system, while
providing transparency of heterogeneity at the platform level

Examples of middleware: Object Management Group’s (OMG), Common Object Request

Broker Architecture (CORBA), Remote Procedure Call (RPC), Message Passing Interface
(MPI)

3. Motivation

The following are the keypoints that acts as a driving force behind DS:

Inherently distributed computations: DS can process the computations at geographically

remote locations.
Resource sharing: The hardware, databases, special libraries can be shared between
systems without owning a dedicated copy or a replica. This is cost effective and reliable.
Access to geographically remote data and resources: As mentioned previously,
computations may happen at remote locations. Resources such as centralized servers can
also be accessed from distant locations.
Enhanced reliability: DS provides enhanced reliability, since they run on multiple copies of
resources. The distribution of resources at distant locations makes them less susceptible for
faults.

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The term reliability comprises of:

1. Availability: The resource/ service provided by the resource should be accessible
at all times
2. Integrity: the value/state of the resource should be correct and consistent.
3. Fault-Tolerance: The ability to recover from system failures
4. Increased performance/cost ratio: The resource sharing and remote access
Features of DS naturally increase the performance / cost
ratio.
5. Scalable: The number of systems operating in a distributed environment can be
increased as the demand increases.

MESSAGE-PASSING SYSTEMS VERSUS SHARED MEMORY

SYSTEMS

Communication among processors takes place via shared data variables, and
control variables for synchronization among the processors. The communications
between the tasks in multiprocessor systems take place through two main modes:

Message passing systems:

 This allows multiple processes to read and write data to the message queue
without being connected to each other.
 Messages are stored on the queue until their recipient retrieves them. Message
queues are quite useful for inter process communication and are used by most
operating systems.

Shared memory systems:

 The shared memory is the memory that can be simultaneously accessed by
multiple processes. This is done so that the processes can communicate with each
other.
 Communication among processors takes place through shared data variables, and
control variables for synchronization among the processors.
 Semaphores and monitors are common synchronization mechanisms on shared
memory systems.
 When shared memory model is implemented in a distributed environment, it is
termed as distributed shared memory.

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a) Message Passing Model b) Shared Memory Model

Fig 1.11: Inter-process communication models

Differences between message passing and shared memory models

Message Passing Distributed Shared Memory

Services Offered:
Variables have to be marshalled The processes share variables directly, so no
from one process, transmitted and marshalling and unmarshalling. Shared
unmarshalled into other variables at the variables can be named, stored and accessed in
receiving process. DSM.
Processes can communicate with other Here, a process does not have private address
processes. They can be protected from one space. So one process can alter the execution
another by having private address spaces. of other.
This technique can be used in heterogeneous This cannot be used to heterogeneous
computers. computers.
Synchronization between processes is through Synchronization is through locks and
message passing primitives. semaphores.
Processes communicating via message passing Processes communicating through DSM
must execute at the same time. may execute with non-overlapping lifetimes.
Efficiency:
All remote data accesses are explicit and Any particular read or update may or may not
therefore the programmer is always aware of involve communication by the underlying
whether a particular operation is in-process or runtime support.
involves the expense of communication.

Emulating message-passing on a shared memory system (MP → SM)

 The shared memory system can be made to act as message passing system. The
shared address space can be partitioned into disjoint parts, one part being
assigned to each processor.
 Send and receive operations care implemented by writing to and reading from the
destination/sender processor’s address space. The read and write operations are
synchronized.
 Specifically, a separate location can be reserved as the mailbox for each ordered
pair of processes.

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Emulating shared memory on a message-passing system (SM → MP)

 This is also implemented through read and write operations. Each shared
location can be modeled as a separate process. Write to a shared location is
emulated by sending an update message to the corresponding owner process and
read operation to a shared location is emulated by sending a query message to the
owner process.
 This emulation is expensive as the processes has to gain access to other process
memory location. The latencies involved in read and write operations may be
high even when using shared memory emulation because the read and write
operations are implemented by using network-wide communication.

PRIMITIVES FOR DISTRIBUTED COMMUNICATION

Blocking / Non blocking / Synchronous / Asynchronous

 Message send and message receive communication primitives are done through
Send() and Receive(), respectively.
 A Send primitive has two parameters: the destination, and the buffer in the user
space that holds the data to be sent.
 The Receive primitive also has two parameters: the source from which the data is
to be received and the user buffer into which the data is to be received.
There are two ways of sending data when the Send primitive is called:

 Buffered: The standard option copies the data from the user buffer to the kernel
buffer. The data later gets copied from the kernel buffer onto the network. For the
Receive primitive, the buffered option is usually required because the data may
already have arrived when the primitive is invoked, and needs a storage place in
the kernel.
 Unbuffered: The data gets copied directly from the user buffer onto the network.

Synchronous
 A Send or a Receive primitive is synchronous if both the Send() and Receive()
handshake with each other.
 The processing for the Send primitive completes only after the invoking
processor learns that the other corresponding Receive primitive has also been
invoked and that the receive operation has been completed.
 The processing for the Receive primitive completes when the data to be
received is copied into the receiver’s user buffer.

Asynchronous
 A Send primitive is said to be asynchronous, if control returns back to the
invoking process after the data item to be sent has been copied out of the user-
specified buffer.
 It does not make sense to define asynchronous Receive primitives.

Blocking primitives
 The primitive commands wait for the message to be delivered. The execution of
the processes is blocked.

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 The sending process must wait after a send until an acknowledgement is made
by the receiver.
 The receiving process must wait for the expected message from the sending
process
 The receipt is determined by polling common buffer or interrupt
 This is a form of synchronization or synchronous communication.
 A primitive is blocking if control returns to the invoking process after the
processing for the primitive completes.

Non Blocking primitives

 If send is non blocking, it returns control to the caller immediately, before
the message is sent.
 The advantage of this scheme is that the sending process can continue computing
in parallel with the message transmission, instead of having the CPU go idle.
 This is a form of asynchronous communication.
 A primitive is non-blocking if control returns back to the invoking process
immediately after invocation, even though the operation has not completed.
 For a non-blocking Send, control returns to the process even before the data
is copied out of the user buffer.
 For anon-blocking Receive, control returns to the process even before the data
may have arrived from the sender.

Send(X, destination, handlek ) //handlek is a return parameter

... ...

... ...

Wait(handle1, handle2, . . . , handlek , . . . , handlem) //Wait always blocks

Figure 1.7: A nonblocking send primitive. When the Wait call returns, at least one of
its parameters is posted.

 Implementing non -blocking operations are tricky.

 For non-blocking primitives, a return parameter on the primitive call returns a
system-generated handle which can be later used to check the status of
completion of the call.
 The process can check for the completion:
o checking if the handle has been flagged or posted
o issue a Wait with a list of handles as parameters: usually blocks until one
of the parameter handles is posted.

The send and receive primitives can be implemented in four modes:

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 Blocking synchronous
 Non- blocking synchronous
 Blocking asynchronous
 Non- blocking asynchronous

Four modes of send operation

Blocking synchronous Send:
 The data gets copied from the user buffer to the kernel buffer and is then sent over the
network.
 After the data is copied to the receiver’s system buffer and a Receive call has been
issued, an acknowledgement back to the sender causes control to return to the
process that invoked the Send operation and completes the Send.

Non-blocking synchronous Send:

 Control returns back to the invoking process as soon as the copy of data from the user
buffer to the kernel buffer is initiated.
 A parameter in the non-blocking call also gets set with the handle of a location that
the user process can later check for the completion of the synchronous send
operation.
 The location gets posted after an acknowledgement returns from the receiver.
 The user process can keep checking for the completion of the non-blocking
synchronous Send by testing the returned handle, or it can invoke the blocking Wait
operation on the returned handle
Blocking asynchronous Send:
 The user process that invokes the Send is blocked until the data is copied from the
user’s buffer to the kernel buffer.

Non-blocking asynchronous Send:

 The user process that invokes the Send is blocked until the transfer of the data from
the user’s buffer to the kernel buffer is initiated.
 Control returns to the user process as soon as this transfer is initiated, and a parameter
in the non-blocking call also gets set with the handle of a location that the user
process can check later using the Wait operation for the completion of the
asynchronous Send.

 The asynchronous Send completes when the data has been copied out of the user’s

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Fig a) Blocking synchronous send and blocking Fig b) Non-blocking synchronous send and
receive blocking receive

Fig c) Blocking asynchronous send Fig d) Non-blocking asynchronous send

buffer. The checking for the completion may be necessary if the user wants to reuse the
buffer from which the data was sent.

Modes of receive operation

Blocking Receive:
The Receive call blocks until the data expected arrives and is written in the specified
user buffer. Then control is returned to the user process.

Non-blocking Receive:
 The Receive call will cause the kernel to register the call and return the handle
of a location that the user process can later check for the completion of the
non-blocking Receive operation.
 This location gets posted by the kernel after the expected data arrives and is
copied to the user-specified buffer. The user process can check for the
completion of the non-blocking Receive by invoking the Wait operation on the
returned handle.

Processor Synchrony

Processor synchrony indicates that all the processors execute in lock-step with their
clocks synchronized.

Since distributed systems do not follow a common clock, this abstraction is implemented
using some form of barrier synchronization to ensure that no processor begins executing the

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next step of code until all the processors have completed executing the previous steps of
code assigned to each of the processors.

Libraries and standards

There exists a wide range of primitives for message-passing. The message-passing interface
(MPI) library and the PVM (parallel virtual machine) library are used largely by the
scientific community
 Message Passing Interface (MPI): This is a standardized and portable message-
passing system to function on a wide variety of parallel computers. MPI primarily
addresses the message-passing parallel programming model: data is moved from the
address space of one process to that of another process through cooperative
operations on each process.
 The primary goal of the Message Passing Interface is to provide a widely used
standard for writing message passing programs.
 Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM): It is a software tool for parallel networking of
computers. It is designed to allow a network of heterogeneous Unix and/or Windows
machines to be used as a single distributed parallel processor.
 Remote Method Invocation (RMI): RMI (Remote Method Invocation) is a way that
a programmer can write object-oriented programming in which objects on different
computers can interact in a distributed network. It is a set of protocols being
developed by Sun's JavaSoft division that enables Java objects to communicate
remotely with other Java objects.
 Remote Procedure Call (RPC): RPC is a powerful technique for constructing
distributed, client-server based applications. In RPC, the procedure need not exist in
the same address space as the calling procedure. The two processes may be on the
same system, or they may be on different systems with a network connecting them.
By using RPC, programmers of distributed applications avoid the details of the
interface with the network. RPC makes the client/server model of computing more
powerful and easier to program.

Differences between RMI and RPC

RMI RPC
RMI uses an object oriented paradigm RPC is not object oriented and does not
where the user needs to know the object deal with objects. Rather, it calls specific
and the method of the object he needs to subroutines that are already established
invoke.
RMI handles the complexities of With RPC looks like a local call. RPC
passing along the invocation from the handles the complexities involved with
local to the remote computer. But passing the call from the local to the
instead of passing a procedural call, remote computer.
RMI passes a reference to the object
and the method that is being
called.

The commonalities between RMI and RPC are as follows:

 They both support programming with interfaces.

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 They are constructed on top of request-reply protocols.

 They both offer a similar level of transparency.

 Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA): CORBA describes a

messaging mechanism by which objects distributed over a network can communicate with
each other irrespective of the platform and language used to develop those objects. The data
representation is concerned with an external representation for the structured and primitive
types that can be passed as the arguments and results of remote method invocations in
CORBA. It can be used by a variety of programming languages.

SYNCHRONOUS VS ASYNCHRONOUS EXECUTIONS

The execution of process in distributed systems may be synchronous or asynchronous.

Asynchronous Execution:
A communication among processes is considered asynchronous, when every
communicating process can have a different observation of the order of the messages being
exchanged. In an asynchronous execution:
 there is no processor synchrony and there is no bound on the drift rate of
processor clocks
 message delays are finite but unbounded
 no upper bound on the time taken by a process

Fig 1.13: Asynchronous execution in message passing system

Synchronous Execution:
A communication among processes is considered synchronous when every process
observes the same order of messages within the system. In the same manner, the execution is
considered synchronous, when every individual process in the system observes the same
total order of all the processes which happen within it. In a synchronous execution:
 processors are synchronized and the clock drift rate between any two processors is
bounded
 message delivery times are such that they occur in one logical step or round
 upper bound on the time taken by a process to execute a step.

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Fig 1.14: Synchronous execution

Emulating an asynchronous system by a synchronous system (A → S)

An asynchronous program can be emulated on a synchronous system fairly trivially as the
synchronous system is a special case of an asynchronous system – all communication
finishes within the same round in which it is initiated.

Emulating a synchronous system by an asynchronous system (S → A)

A synchronous program can be emulated on an asynchronous system using a tool
called synchronizer.

Emulation for a fault free system

Fig 1.15: Emulations in a failure free message passing system

If system A can be emulated by system B, denoted A/B, and if a problem is not solvable in
B, then it is also not solvable in A. If a problem is solvable in A, it is also solvable in B.
Hence, in a sense, all four classes are equivalent in terms of computability in failure-free
systems.

6. DESIGN ISSUES AND CHALLENGES IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

The design of distributed systems has numerous challenges. They can be categorized
into:
 Issues related to system and operating systems design
 Issues related to algorithm design
 Issues arising due to emerging technologies
The above three classes are not mutually exclusive.
Issues related to system and operating systems design

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The following are some of the common challenges to be addressed in designing a

distributed system from system perspective:
 Communication: This task involves designing suitable communication mechanisms
among the various processes in the networks.
Examples: RPC, RMI
 Processes: The main challenges involved are: process and thread management at both
client and server environments, migration of code between systems, design of software and
mobile agents.
 Naming: Devising easy to use and robust schemes for names, identifiers, and
addresses is essential for locating resources and processes in a transparent and scalable
manner. The remote and highly varied geographical locations make this task difficult.
 Synchronization: Mutual exclusion, leader election, deploying physical clocks,
global state recording are some synchronization mechanisms.
 Data storage and access Schemes: Designing file systems for easy and efficient data
storage with implicit accessing mechanism is very much essential for distributed operation
 Consistency and replication: The notion of Distributed systems goes hand in hand
with replication of data, to provide high degree of scalability. The replicas should be handled
with care since data consistency is prime issue.
 Fault tolerance: This requires maintenance of failure of links, nodes, and processes.
Some of the common fault tolerant techniques are resilience, reliable communication,
distributed commit, check pointing and recovery, agreement and consensus, failure
detection, and self-stabilization.
 Security: Cryptography, secure channels, access control, key management –
generation and distribution, authorization, and secure group management are some of the
security measure that is imposed on distributed systems.
 Applications Programming Interface (API) and transparency:The user
friendliness and ease of use is very important to make the distributed services to be used by
wide community. Transparency, which is hiding inner implementation policy from users, is
of the following types:
 Access transparency: hides differences in data representation
 Location transparency: hides differences in locations y providing uniform access to
data located at remote locations.
 Migration transparency: allows relocating resources without changing names.
 Replication transparency: Makes the user unaware whether he is working on
original or replicated data.
 Concurrency transparency: Masks the concurrent use of shared resources for the
user.
 Failure transparency: system being reliable and fault-tolerant.
 Scalability and modularity: The algorithms, data and services must be as distributed
as possible. Various techniques such as replication, caching and cache management, and
asynchronous processing help to achieve scalability.

Algorithmic challenges in distributed computing

 Designing useful execution models and frameworks

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The interleaving model, partial order model, input/output automata model and the Temporal
Logic of Actions (TLA) are some examples of models that provide different degrees of
infrastructure.
 Dynamic distributed graph algorithms and distributed routing algorithms
 The distributed system is generally modeled as a distributed graph.
 Hence graph algorithms are the base for large number of higher level
communication, data dissemination, object location, and object search functions.
 These algorithms must have the capacity to deal with highly dynamic graph
characteristics. They are expected to function like routing algorithms.
 The performance of these algorithms has direct impact on user-perceived latency, data
traffic and load in the network.
 Time and global state in a distributed system
 The geographically remote resources demands the synchronization based on logical
time.
 Logical time is relative and eliminates the overheads of providing physical time for
applications .Logical time can
(i) capturethe logic and inter-process dependencies
(ii) track the relative progress at each process
 Maintaining the global state of the system across space involves the role of time
dimension for consistency. This can be done with extra effort in a coordinated manner.
 Deriving appropriate measures of concurrency also involves the time dimension, as
the execution and communication speed of threads may vary a lot.
 Synchronization/coordination mechanisms
 Synchronization is essential for the distributed processes to facilitate concurrent
execution without affecting other processes.
 The synchronization mechanisms also involve resource management and
concurrency management mechanisms.
 Some techniques for providing synchronization are:
 Physical clock synchronization: Physical clocks usually diverge in theirvalues due
to hardware limitations. Keeping them synchronized is a fundamental challenge to
maintain common time.
 Leader election: All the processes need to agree on which process willplay the
role of a distinguished process or a leader process. A leaderis necessary even for many
distributed algorithms because there is often some asymmetry.
 Mutual exclusion:Access to the critical resource(s) has to be coordinated.
 Deadlock detection and resolution:This is done to avoid duplicate work, and
deadlock resolution shouldbe coordinated to avoid unnecessary aborts of processes.
 Termination detection: cooperation among the processesto detect the specific global
state of quiescence.
 Garbage collection: Detecting garbage requirescoordination among the processes.
 Group communication, multicast, and ordered message delivery
 A group is a collection of processes that share a common context and collaborate on a
common task within an application domain. Group management protocols are needed for
group communication wherein processes can join and leave groups dynamically, or fail.

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 The concurrent execution of remote processes may sometimes violate the semantics
and order of the distributed program. Hence, a formal specification of the semantics
ofordered delivery need to be formulated, and then implemented.
 Monitoring distributed events and predicates
 Predicates defined on program variables that are local to different processes are used
for specifying conditions on the global system state.
 On-line algorithms for monitoring such predicates are hence important.
 An important paradigm for monitoring distributed events is that of event streaming,
wherein streams of relevant events reported from different processes are examined
collectively to detect predicates.
 The specification of such predicates uses physical or logical time relationships.
 Distributed program design and verification tools
Methodically designed and verifiably correct programs can greatly reduce the overhead of
software design, debugging, and engineering. Designing these is a big challenge.
 Debugging distributed programs
Debugging distributed programs is much harder because of the concurrency and replications.
Adequate debugging mechanisms and tools are need to be designed to meet this challenges.
 Data replication, consistency models, and caching
 Fast access to data and other resources is important in distributed systems.
 Managing replicas and their updates faces concurrency problems.
 Placement of the replicas in the systems is also a challenge because resources
usually cannot be freely replicated.
 World Wide Web design – caching, searching, scheduling
 WWW is a commonly known distributed system.
 The issues of object replication and caching, prefetching of objects have to be done on
WWW also.
 Object search and navigation on the web are important functions in the operation
of the web.
 Distributed shared memory abstraction
 A shared memory is easier to implement since it does not involve managing the
communication tasks.
 The communication is done by the middleware by message passing.
 The overhead of shared memory is to be dealt by the middleware technology.
 Some of the methodologies that does the task of communication in shared memory
distributed systems are:
 Wait-free algorithms: The ability of a process to complete its execution irrespective
of theactions of other processes is wait free algorithm. They control the access to shared
resources in the shared memory abstraction. They are expensive.
 Mutual exclusion: Concurrent access of processes to a shared resource or data is
executed in mutually exclusive manner. Only one process is allowed to execute the critical
section at any given time. In a distributed system, shared variables or a local kernel cannot
be used to implement mutual exclusion. Message passing is the sole means for implementing
distributed mutual exclusion.
 Register constructions:Architectures must be designed in such a way that, registers
allows concurrent access without any restrictions on the concurrency permitted.
 Reliable and fault-tolerant distributed systems

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The following are some of the fault tolerant strategies:

 Consensus algorithms: Consensus algorithms allow correctly functioning processes
to reach agreement among themselves in spite of the existence of malicious processes. The
goal of the malicious processes is to prevent the correctly functioning processes from
reaching agreement. The malicious processes operate by sending messages with misleading
information, to confuse the correctly functioning processes.
 Replication and replica management: The Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR)
technique is used in software and hardware implementation. TMR is a fault-tolerant form of
N-modular redundancy, in which three systems perform a process and that result is
processed by a majority-voting system to produce a single output.
 Voting and quorum systems: Providing redundancy in the active or passive
components in the system and then performing voting based on some quorum criterion is a
classical way of dealing with fault-tolerance. Designing efficient algorithms for this
purpose is the challenge.
 Distributed databases and distributed commit: The distributed databases should
also follow atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability (ACID) properties.
 Self-stabilizing systems: All system executions have associated good(or legal) states
and bad (or illegal) states; during correct functioning, the system makes transitions
among the good states. A self-stabilizing algorithm guarantee to take the system to a good
state even if a bad state were toarise due to some error. Self-stabilizing algorithms require
some in-builtredundancy to track additional variables of the state and do extra work.
 Checkpointing and recovery algorithms:Checkpointing is periodically recording
the current state on secondary storage so that, in case ofa failure. The entire computation is
not lost but can be recovered from oneof the recently taken checkpoints. Checkpointing in a
distributed environment is difficult because if the checkpoints at the different processes
arenot coordinated, the local checkpoints may become useless because theyare inconsistent
with the checkpoints at other processes.
 Failure detectors:The asynchronous distributed do not have a bound on the message
transmission time. This makes the message passing very difficult, since the receiver do not
know the waiting time. Failure detectors probabilistically suspect another process as
havingfailed and then converge on a determination of the up/down status of thesuspected
process.
 Load balancing
The objective of load balancing is to gain higher throughput, and reduce the userperceived
latency. Load balancing may be necessary because of a variety offactors such as high
network traffic or high request rate causing the networkconnection to be a bottleneck, or
high computational load. The following aresome forms of load balancing:
 Data migration: The ability to move data around in the system, based on the access
pattern of the users
 Computation migration: The ability to relocate processes in order to perform
a re distribution of the workload.
 Distributed scheduling: This achieves a better turnaround time for the users by
using idle processing power in the system more efficiently.
 Real-time scheduling

Real-time scheduling becomes more challenging when a global view of the system state is
absent with more frequent on-line or dynamic changes. The message propagation delays

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which are network-dependentare hard to control or predict. This is an hindrance to meet the
QoS requirements of the network.

 Performance
User perceived latency in distributed systems must be reduced. The common issues in
performance:
 Metrics: Appropriate metrics must be defined for measuring the performance of
theoretical distributed algorithms and its implementation.
 Measurement methods/tools: The distributed system is a complex entity
appropriate methodology and tools must be developed for measuring the performance
metrics.

Applications of distributed computing and newer challenges

The deployment environment of distributed systems ranges from mobile systems to

cloud storage. All the environments have their own challenges:
 Mobile systems
o Mobile systems which use wireless communication in shared broadcast
medium have issues related to physical layer such as transmission range,
power, battery power consumption, interfacing with wired internet, signal
processing and interference.
o The issues pertaining to other higher layers include routing, location
management, channel allocation, localization and position estimation, and
mobility management.
o Apart from the above mentioned common challenges, the architectural
differences of the mobile network demands varied treatment. The two
architectures are:
 Base-station approach (cellular approach): The geographical region is divided into
hexagonal physical locations called cells. The powerful base station transmits signals to all
other nodes in its range.
 Ad-hoc network approach: This is an infrastructure-less approach which do not
have any base station to transmit signals. Instead all the responsibility is distributed among
the mobile nodes.
 It is evident that both the approaches work in different environment with different
principles of communication. Designing a distributed system to cater the varied need is a
great challenge.

 Sensor networks
o A sensor is a processor with an electro-mechanical interface that is capable
ofsensing physical parameters.
o They are low cost equipment with limited computational power and battery
life. They are designed to handle streaming data and route it to external
computer network and processes.
o They are susceptible to faults and have to reconfigure themselves.

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o These features introduces a whole newset of challenges, such as position

estimation and time estimation when designing a distributed system .
 Ubiquitous or pervasive computing
o In Ubiquitous systems the processors are embedded in the environment to
performapplication functions in the background.
o Examples: Intelligent devices, smart homes etc.
o They are distributed systems with recent advancements operating in wireless
environments through actuator mechanisms.
o They can be self-organizing and network-centricwith limited resources.
 Peer-to-peer computing
o Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is computing over an application layernetwork
where all interactions among the processors are at a same level.
o This is a form of symmetric computation against the client sever paradigm.
o They are self-organizing with or without regular structure to the network.
o Some of the key challenges include: object storage mechanisms, efficient
object lookup, and retrieval in a scalable manner; dynamic reconfiguration
with nodes as well as objects joining and leaving the networkrandomly;
replication strategies to expedite object search; tradeoffs betweenobject size
latency and table sizes; anonymity, privacy, and security.
 Publish-subscribe, content distribution, and multimedia
o The users in present day require only the information of interest.
o In a dynamic environment where the informationconstantly fluctuates there is
great demand for
o Publish:an efficient mechanism for distributing this information
o Subscribe: an efficient mechanism to allow end users to indicate interest in
receiving specific kinds of information
o An efficient mechanism foraggregating large volumes of published
information and filtering it as per theuser’s subscription filter.
o Content distribution refers to a mechanism that categorizes the information
based on parameters.
o The publish subscribe and content distribution overlap each other.
o Multimedia data introduces special issue because of its large size.
 Distributed agents
o Agents are software processes or sometimes robots that move around the
system to do specific tasks for which they are programmed.
o Agents collect and process information and can exchangesuch information
with other agents.
o Challenges in distributed agent systems include coordination mechanisms
among the agents, controlling the mobility of the agents,their software design
and interfaces.
 Distributed data mining
o Data mining algorithms process large amount of data to detect patterns and
trends in the data, to mine or extract useful information.

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o The mining can be done by applying database and artificial intelligence

techniques to a data repository.
 Grid computing
 Grid computing is deployed to manage resources. For instance, idle CPU
cycles of machines connected to the network will be available to others.
 The challenges includes: scheduling jobs, framework for implementing quality
of service, real-time guarantees, security.
 Security in distributed systems
The challenges of security in a distributed setting include: confidentiality,
authentication and availability. This can be addressed using efficient and scalable solutions.

A MODEL OF DISTRIBUTED COMPUTATIONS:

DISTRIBUTED PROGRAM

 A distributed program is composed of a set of asynchronous processes that

communicate by message passing over the communication network. Each process
may run on different processor.
 The processes do not share a global memory and communicate solely by passing
messages. These processes do not share a global clock that is instantaneously
accessible to these processes.
 Process execution and message transfer are asynchronous – aprocess may execute an
action spontaneously and a process sending a message does not wait for the delivery
of the message to be complete.
 The global state of a distributed computation is composed of the states of the
processes and the communication channels. The state of a process ischaracterized by
the state of its local memory and depends upon the context.
 The state of a channel is characterized by the set of messages in transit in thechannel.

A MODEL OF DISTRIBUTED EXECUTIONS

 The execution of a process consists of a sequential execution of its actions.

 The actions are atomic and the actions of a process are modeled as three types of
events:
*internal events,
*message send events,
*message receive events.

Let ei x denote the xth event at process pi . For a message m, let send(m) and rec(m) denote
its send and receive events, respectively.
 The occurrence of events changes the states of respective processes and channels, thus
causing transitions in the global system state.
 An internal event changes the state of the process at which it occurs.
 A send event changes the state of the process that sends the message and the state of
the channel on which the message is sent.

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 The execution of process pi produces a sequence of events e1, e2, e3, …, and it is
denoted by Hi: Hi =(hii). Here hi is set of events produced by pi and are the casual
dependencies among events pi.
 msgindicates the dependency that exists due to message passing between two events.


Fig : Space time distribution of distributed systems

distributed execution involving three processes.

1. A horizontal line represents the progress of the process;
2. a dot indicates an event;
3. a slant arrow indicates a message transfer.
Generally, the execution of an event takes a finite amount of time
In this figure, for process p1, the second event is a message send event, the third event is an internal event,
and the fourth event is a message receive event.

Casual Precedence Relations

Causal message ordering is a partial ordering of messages in a distributed computing
environment. It is the delivery of messages to a process in the order in which they were
transmitted to that process.

Happen Before Relation

The partial ordering obtained by generalizing the relationship between two process is called
as happened-before relation or causal ordering or potential causal ordering. This term
was coined by Lamport. Happens-before defines a partial order of events in a distributed
system. Some events can’t be placed in the order. If say A →B if A happens before B. AB
is defined using the following rules:
 Local ordering:A and B occur on same process and A occurs before B.
 Messages: send(m) → receive(m) for any message m
 Transitivity: e → e’’ if e → e’ and e’ → e’’
 Ordering can be based on two situations:
1. If two events occur in same process then they occurred in the order observed.
2. During message passing, the event of sending message occurred before the event of
receiving it.

Lamports ordering is happen before relation denoted by 

 ab, if a and b are events in the same process and a occurred before b.

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 ab, if a is the event of sending a message m in a process and b is the event of

the same message m being received by another process.
 If ab and bc, then ac. Lamports law follow transitivity property.

When all the above conditions are satisfied, then it can be concluded that ab is casually
related. Consider two events c and d; cd and dc is false (i.e) they are not casually
related, then c and d are said to be concurrent events denoted as c||d.

Fig : Communication between processes

Fig shows the communication of messages m1 and m2 between three processes p1, p2 and
p3. a, b, c, d, e and f are events. It can be inferred from the diagram that, ab; cd; ef;
b->c; df; ad; af; bd; bf. Also a||e and c||e.

Logical vs physical concurrency

Physical as well as logical concurrency is two events that creates confusion in
distributed systems.
Physical concurrency: Several program units from the same program that execute
simultaneously.
Logical concurrency: Multiple processors providing actual concurrency. The actual
execution of programs is taking place in interleaved fashion on a single processor.

Differences between logical and physical concurrency

Logical concurrency Physical concurrency
Several units of the same program execute Several program units of the same program
simultaneously on same processor, giving an execute at the same time on different processors.
illusion to the programmer that they are
executing on multiple processors.
They are implemented through interleaving. They are implemented as uni-processor with I/O
channels, multiple CPUs, network of uni or
multi CPU machines.

MODELS OF COMMUNICATION NETWORK

The three main types of communication models in distributed systems are:

FIFO (first-in, first-out): each channel acts as a FIFO message queue.
Non-FIFO (N-FIFO): a channel acts like a set in which a sender process adds messages and
receiver removes messages in random order.
Causal Ordering (CO): It follows Lamport’s law.
o A system that supports the causal ordering model satisfies the following property:

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This property ensures that causally related messages destined to the same destination are delivered in an
order that is consistent with their causality relation. Causally ordered delivery of messages implies FIFO
message delivery. Causal ordering model considerably simplifies the design of distributed algorithms
because it provides a built-in synchronization.

The relation between the three models is given by CO  FIFO  N-FIFO.

GLOBAL STATE

 The global state of a distributed system is a collection of the local states of its
components, namely, the processes and the communication channels.
 The state of a process at any time is defined by the contents of processor registers,
stacks, local memory, etc. and depends on the local context of the distributed
application.
 The state of a channel is given by the set of messages in transit in the channel.
 The occurrence of events changes the states of respective processes and channels.
 Example: An internal event changes the state of the process at which it occurs. A send event
changes the state of the process that sends the message and the state of the channel on which the
message is sent. A receive event changes the state of the process that or receives the message and
the state of the channel on which the message is received.
Notations:
1. LSix denotes the state of process pi after the occurrence of event eix and before the event ei x+1 .
2. LSi0 denotes the initial state of process pi .
3. LSix is a result of the execution of all the events executed by process pi till eix .
4. Let send(m) ≤ LSix denote the fact that ∃y:1≤y≤x :: eiy =send(m).
5. Let rec(m) ≤/ LSix denote the fact that ∀y:1≤y≤x :: eiy = rec(m).

Channel State:

• A Channel State:

The state of a channel depends upon the states of the processes it connects.
Let SCi j x,y denote the state of a channel Cij . The state of a channel is defined as follows:

Thus, channel state SCi j x,y denotes all messages that pi sent upto event eix and which process pj had
not received until event ejy
The global state of a distributed system is a collection of the local states of the processes and the channels.
Notationally, global state GS is defined as,

For a global state to be meaningful, the states of all the components of the distributed system must be recorded
at the same instant.

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For a successful Global State, all states must be consistent:

Consistent states: The states should not violate causality. Such states are called consistent
global states and are meaningful global states.
Inconsistent global states: They are not meaningful in the sense that a distributed system
can never be in an inconsistent state.
An Example , Consider the following space-time diagram of a distributed execution.

In Figure A global state GS1 = { LS11 , LS23 , LS33 , LS42 } is inconsistent because the state of p2 has recorded the
receipt of message m12, however, the state of p1 has not recorded its send. A global state GS2 consisting of local states
{ LS12 , LS24 , LS34 , LS42 } is consistent; all the channels are empty except C21 that contains message m21.

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