Distributed System Models

Most concepts are

drawn from Chapter 2
© Pearson Education

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 Presentation Outline

 Introduction
 Physical Models:
 Three Generations of DS: Early, Internet-Scale, Contemporary
 Architectural Models
 Software Layers

 System Architectures

 Client-Server
 Clients and a Single Server, Multiple Servers, Proxy Servers with Caches, Peer
Model
 Alternative Client-Sever models driven by:
 Mobile code, mobile agents, network computers, thin clients, mobile devices,
and spontaneous networking
 Design Challenges/Requirements
 Fundamental Models – formal description
 Interaction, failure, and security models.

 Summary

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 Introduction

 A Model is “a simplified representation of a system

or phenomenon”
 Real world systems should be designed to
function correctly in ALL circumstances/scenarios.
 Distributed system models help in…
 ..classifying and understanding different implementations
 ..identifying their weaknesses and their strengths
 ..crafting new systems out of pre-validated building blocks
 We will study distributed system models from
different perspectives
 Structure, organization, and placement of components
 Interactions
3  Fundamental properties of systems 3
 Models

Models are simple abstractions

algorithms
that help overcome the variability
-- abstractions that preserve the
essential features, but hide the
implementation details and
models
simplify writing distributed
algorithms for problem solving Implementation of
models

Optical or radio communication? Real hardware

PC or Mac?
Are clocks perfectly synchronized?

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 Characterization: Challenges
(Difficulties and Threats)

 Widely varying models

 High variation of workload, partial disconnection of components,
or poor connection.
 Wide range of system environments
 Heterogeneous hardware, operating systems, network, and
performance.
 Internal problems
 Non synchronized clocks, conflicting updates, various hardware
and software failures.
 External threats
 Attacks on data integrity, secrecy, and denial of service.

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 Characterization: Dealing with Challenges

 Observations
 Widely varying models of use
 The structure and the organization of systems allow for distribution
of workloads, redundant services, and high availability.
 Wide range of system environments
 A flexible and modular structure allows for implementing different
solutions for different hardware, OS, and networks.
 Internal problems
 The relationship between components and the patterns of
interaction can resolve concurrency issues, while structure and
organization of component can support failover mechanisms.
 External threats
 Security has to be built into the infrastructure and it is fundamental
for shaping the relationship between components.

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 Architectural model

 An Architectural model of a distributed system

is concerned with the placement of its parts
and relationship between them. Examples:
 Client-Server (CS) and peer-to-peer models.
 CS can be modified by:
 The partitioning of data/replication at cooperative
servers
 The caching of data by proxy servers or clients
 The use of mobile code and mobile agents
 The requirements to add or remove mobile devices.

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 Fundamental Models

 Fundamental Models are concerned with a formal

description of the properties that are common in all
of the architectural models
 E.g. Models addressing time synchronization,
message delays, failures, security etc
 Security issues are addressed as:
 Interaction Model – deals with performance and the
difficulty of setting of time limits in a distributed system.
 Failure Model – specification of the faults that can be
exhibited by processes
 Secure Model – discusses possible threats to processes
and communication channels.
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1. Physical Models

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 Physical Models

 A representation of the underlying hardware

elements of a DS that abstracts away specific
details of the computer/networking technologies.
 Baseline physical model
 3 Generations of DS:
 Early distributed systems [late 70-80s]: LAN-based
 Internet-scale distributed systems [early 90-2005]:
Clusters, grids, P2P, Clouds
 Contemporary distributed systems: dynamic nodes
like mobile-based services (nodes are very dynamic
not static like other models).
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2. Architectural Models

Software Layers
System Architectures
Interfaces and Objects
Design Requirements

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 Architectural Models – Intro [1]

 The architecture of a system is its structure in terms

of separately specified components.
 Its goal is to meet present and likely future demands.
 Major concerns are making the system reliable,
manageable, adaptable, and cost-effective.
 Architectural Model:
 Simplifies and abstracts the functions of individual
components
 The placement of the components across a network of
computers – define patterns for the distribution of data and
workloads
 The interrelationship between the components – ie.,
functional roles and the patterns of communication
between them.

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 Architectural Models – Intro [2]

 Architectural Model - simplifies and abstracts

the functions of individual components:
 An initial simplification is achieved by classifying
processes as:
 Server processes
 Client processes client
client server
server
 Peer processes
 Cooperate and communicate in a symmetric manner to
perform a task.

peer
peer

13 peer
peer
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 a) Software Architecture and Layers

 The term software architecture referred:

 Originally to the structure of software as layers or modules in a single computer.
 More recently in terms of services offered and requested between processes in the
same or different computers.
 Breaking up the complexity of systems by designing them through layers and
services
 Layer: a group of related functional components
 Service: functionality provided to the next layer.

Layer N

Layer 2

(services offered to above layer)

Layer 1

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 Software and hardware service layers in
distributed systems

Applications, services

Middleware

Operating system
Platform

Computer and network hardware

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 Platform

 The lowest hardware and software layers are often

referred to as a platform for distributed systems and
applications.
 These low-level layers provide services to the layers
above them, which are implemented independently
in each computer.
 Major Examples
 Intel x86/Windows
 Intel x86/Linux
 Intel x86/Solaris
 SPARC/SunOS
 PowerPC/MacOS

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 Middleware

 A layer of software whose purpose is to mask heterogeneity present

in distributed systems and to provide a convenient programming
model to application developers.
 Major Examples:
 Sun RPC (Remote Procedure Calls)
 OMG CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture)
 Microsoft D-COM (Distributed Components Object Model)
 Sun Java RMI
 Modern Middleware:
 Manjrasoft Aneka– for Cloud computing
 IBM WebSphere
 Microsoft .NET
 Sun J2EE
 Google AppEngine

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 b) System Architecture

 The most evident aspect of DS design is the

division of responsibilities between system
components (applications, servers, and other
processes) and the placement of the
components on computers in the network.
 It has major implication for:
 Performance, reliability, and security of the
resulting system.

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 Client Server Basic Model:
Clients invoke individual servers

Client invocation invocation Server

result result
Server

Client
Key:
Process: Computer:

 Client processes interact with individual server processes in a separate computer

in order to access data or resource. The server in turn may use services of other
servers.
 Example:
 A Web Server is often a client of file server.
 Browser  search engine -> crawlers  other web servers.
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 Client-Server Architecture Types

 Two-tier model (classic)

client
client server
server

 Three-tier (when the server, becomes a client)

client
client Server/client
Server/client server
server

 Multi-tier (cascade model)

server
server

client
client Server/client
Server/client Server/client
Server/client
server
server
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 Clients and Servers

 General interaction between a client and a server.

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 A service provided by multiple servers
Service

Server
Client

Server

Client
Server

 Services may be implemented as several server processes in separate host computers.

 Example: Cluster based Web servers and apps such as Google, parallel databases Oracle

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 Proxy servers (replication transparency) and
caches: Web proxy server

Client Web
server
Proxy
server

Client Web
server

 A cache is a store of recently used data.

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 Peer Processes: A distributed application based
on peer processes
Peer 2

Peer 1
Application

Application

Sharable Peer 3
objects
Application

Peer 4

Application

Peers 5 .... N

 All of the processes play similar roles, interacting cooperatively as peers to

perform distributed activities or computations without distinction between clients
and servers. E.g., music sharing systems Gnutella, Napster, Kaza, etc.
 Distributed “white board” – users on several computers to view and interactively
24 modify a picture between them. 24
 P2P with a Centralized Index Server
(e.g. Napster Architecture)

peer
peer

peer
peer

peer
peer
peer
peer

peer
peer

peer
peer
peer
peer

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 Variants of Client Sever Model: Mobile code
and Web applets
a) client request results in the downloading of applet code

Client Web
Applet code server

b) client interacts with the applet

Web
Client Applet server

 Applets downloaded to clients give good interactive response

 Mobile codes such as Applets are potential security threat, so the
browser gives applets limited access to local resources (e.g. NO
access to local/user file system).
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 Variants of Client Sever Model: Mobile Agents

 A running program (code and data) that travels from one

computer to another in a network carrying out an autonomous
task, usually on behalf of some other process
 – advantages: flexibility, savings in communications cost
 – virtual markets, software maintain on the computers within an
organisation.
 Potential security threat to the resources in computers they visit.
The environment receiving agent should decide which of the local
resource to allow. (e.g., crawlers and web servers).
 Agents themselves can be vulnerable – they may not be able to
complete task if they are refused access.

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 Thin clients and compute servers

Compute server
Network computer or PC

Thin network Application

Client Process

 Network computer: download OS and applications from the

network and run on a desktop (solve up-gradation problem) at
runtime.
 Thin clients: Windows-based UI on the user machine and
application execution on a remote computer. E.g, X-11 system.

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 Mobile devices and spontaneous networking
[3rd Generation Distributed System]

 The world is increasingly populated by small and portable

computing devices.
 W-LAN needs to handle constantly changing heterogeneous,
roaming devices
 Need to provide discovery services: (1) registration service to
enable servers to publish their services and (2) lookup service to
allow clients to discover services that meet their requirements.
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 c) Interfaces and Objects

 The use of CS has impact on the software

architecture as follows:
 Distribution of responsibilities
 Synchronization mechanisms between client and server
 Admissible types of requests/responses
 Basic CS model, responsibility is statically allocated.
 File server is responsible for file, not for web pages.
 Peer process model, responsibility is dynamically
allocated:
 In fully decentralized music file sharing system, search
process may be delegated to different peers at runtime.

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 d) Design Requirements/Challenges of Distributed
Systems

 Performance Issues
 Responsiveness

 Support interactive clients

 Use caching and replication
 Throughput
 Load balancing and timeliness

 Quality of Service:
 Reliability

 Security

 Adaptive performance.

 Dependability issues:
 Correctness, security, and fault tolerance

 Dependable applications continue to work in the presence of

faults in hardware, software, and networks.

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3. Fundamental Models

Interaction models
Failure model
Security model

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 Fundamental models

 Fundamental Models are concerned with a formal description of the

properties that are common in all of the architectural models.
 Models addressing time synchronization, message delays, failures,
security issues are:
 Interaction Model – deals with performance and the difficulty of

setting of time limits in a distributed system.

 Failure Model – specification of the faults that can be exhibited by

processes
 Security Model – discusses possible threats to processes and

communication channels.

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 Fundamental models Contd…

There is no global time in a distributed system so all communication is

achieved by message passing. This is subject to delays, failures of
various kinds on the networks, and security attacks. These issues are
addressed by three models:

a) The interaction model deals with performance and with the

difficulty in setting time limits in a distributed system, for example for
message delivery.
b) The failure model attempts to give precise definitions for the
various faults exhibited by processes and networks. It defines reliable
communication and correct processes.
c) The security model discusses possible threats to processes and
networks.

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 a) Interaction Model

 Computation occurs within processes;

 The processes interact by passing messages,
resulting in:
 Communication (information flow)
 Coordination (synchronization and ordering of activities)
between processes.
 Two significant factors affecting interacting
processes in a distributed system are:
 Communication performance is often a limiting
characteristic.
 It is impossible to maintain a single global notion of time.

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 Interaction Model:
Performance of Communication Channel

 The communication channel in our model is realised in a variety of

ways in DSs. E.g., by implementation of:
 Streams – continuous (e.g. satellite or sensor data).

 Simple message passing over a network.

 Communication over a computer network has performance
characteristics:
 Latency:
 A delay between the start of a message’s transmission from one
process to the beginning of reception by another.
 Bandwidth:
 the total amount of information that can be transmitted over in a given
time.
 Communication channels using the same network, have to share the
available bandwidth.
 Jitter
 The variation in the time taken to deliver a series of messages. It is
very relevant to multimedia data.

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 Interaction Model:
Computer clocks and timing events

 Each computer in a DS has its own internal clock, which can be

used by local processes to obtain the value of the current time.
 Therefore, two processes running on different computers can
associate timestamp with their events.
 However, even if two processes read their clocks at the same
time, their local clocks may supply different time.
 This is because computer clock drifts from perfect time and their

drift rates differ from one another.

 Even if the clocks on all the computers in a DS are set to the
same time initially, their clocks would eventually vary quite
significantly unless corrections are applied.
 There are several techniques to correct time on computer clocks.

For example, computers may use radio receivers to get readings

from GPS (Global Positioning System) with an accuracy about 1
microsecond.

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 Interaction Model:
Two variants of the interaction model

 In a DS it is hard to set time limits on the time taken for process

execution, message delivery or clock drift.
 Synchronous DS – hard to achieve:
 The time taken to execute a step of a process has known lower

and upper bounds.

 Each message transmitted over a channel is received within a

known bounded time.

 Each process has a local clock whose drift rate from real time

has known bound.

 Asynchronous DS: There is NO bounds on:
 Process execution speeds

 Message transmission delays

 Clock drift rates.

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 Interaction Model:
Event Ordering

 In many DS applications we are interested in

knowing whether an event occurred before,
after, or concurrently with another event at
other processes.
 The execution of a system can be described in
terms of events and their ordering despite the lack
of accurate clocks.
 Ideally every event would be precisely (and
consistently) time-stamped but we cannot
guarantee that.

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 b) Failure Model

 In a DS, both processes and communication channels

may fail – i.e., they may depart from what is considered
to be correct or desirable behavior.
 Types of failures:
 Omission Failure - the process or communication channel fails

to perform a requested action

 Arbitrary Failure - the most tricky to deal with, where any type of

error can occur. Corrupt data, unexpected responses

 Timing Failure - related to synchronous messages, where a set

bound [clock drift, message ack, process execution time]

exceeds defined bounds

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 Processes and channels

process p process q

send m receive

Communication channel
Outgoing message buffer Incoming message buffer

 Communication channel produces an omission failure if it

does not transport a message from “p”s outgoing
message buffer to “q”’s incoming message buffer. This is
known as “dropping messages” and is generally caused
by a lack of buffer space at the receiver or at gateway or
by a network transmission error.
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 Omission and arbitrary failures

Class of failure AffectsDescription

Fail-stop Process Process halts and remains halted. Other processes may
detect this state.
Crash Process Process halts and remains halted. Other processes may
not be able to detect this state.
Omission Channel A message inserted in an outgoing message buffer nev
arrives at the other end’s incoming message buffer.
Send-omission Process A process completes a send, but the message is not
put in its outgoing message buffer.
Receive-omission Process A message is put in a process’s incoming message
buffer, but that process does not receive it.
Arbitrary Process or Process/channel exhibits arbitrary behaviour: it may
(Byzantine) channel send/transmit arbitrary messages at arbitrary times,
commit omissions; a process may stop or take an
incorrect step.

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 Timing failures

Class of Failure Affects Description

Clock Process Process’s local clock exceeds the bounds on its
rate of drift from real time.
Performance Process Process exceeds the bounds on the interval
between two steps.
Performance Channel A message’s transmission takes longer than the
stated bound.

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 Masking Failures

 It is possible to construct reliable services from

components that exhibit failures.
 For example, multiple servers that hold replicas of data can
continue to provide a service when one of them crashes.
 We can add reliability through redundancy
 A knowledge of failure characteristics of a component can enable a
new service to be designed to mask the failure of the components on
which it depends:
 Checksums are used to mask corrupted messages to
ensure data integrity. Add reliability at the application
level

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 c) Security Model

 The security of a DS can be achieved by

securing the processes and the channels
used in their interactions and by protecting
the objects that they encapsulate against
unauthorized access.

 Two components: secure channel and secure

process

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 Protecting Objects: Objects and principals
Access rights Object
invocation

Client
result Server

Principal (user) Network Principal (server)

 Use “access rights” that define who is allowed to perform

operation on a object.
 The server should verify the identity of the principal (user)
behind each operation and checking that they have sufficient
access rights to perform the requested operation on the
particular object, rejecting those who do not.

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 The enemy

Copy of m

The enemy
m’
Processp m Processq
Communication channel

 To model security threats, we postulate an enemy that is

capable of sending any process or reading/copying message
between a pair of processes
 Threats form a potential enemy: threats to processes, threats
to communication channels, and denial of service.

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 Defeating security threats: Secure channels

PrincipalA PrincipalB

Processp Secure channel Processq

 Encryption and authentication are used to build secure

channels.
 Each of the processes knows the identity of the principal on
whose behalf the other process is executing and can check
their access rights before performing an operation .
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 Summary

 Most DSs are arranged accordingly to one of a

variety of architectural models:
 Client-Server
 Clients and a Single Sever, Multiple Servers, Proxy Servers
with Cache, Peer Model
 Alternative Client-Sever models driven by:
 Mobile code, mobile agents, network computers, thin clients,
mobile devices and spontaneous networking
 Fundamental Models – formal description
 Interaction, failure, and security models.

 The concepts discussed in the module play an

important role while architecting DS and apps

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 Review Questions

1) In what respect are distributed computing systems superior

to parallel systems?
2) In what respect are parallel systems superior to distributed
computing systems?
3) Discuss the difference between the workstation-server and
the processor-pool model from the availability view point.
4) Discuss the difference between the processor-pool and the
cluster model from the performance view point.

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 Review Nov 18

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