IT-503 : Distributed System

L-T- P: 3-0-0 3

Class Schedule:
Tues: 12.05 -01.00
Wed: 12.05 -01.00
Thurs: 12.05 -01.00

M.Tech 1st Sem

 Objectives

To understand the state-of-the-art in different

existing Distributed Systems including
architecture, protocols and distributed
algorithms.
 Syllabus
• Characterization of Distributed Systems, Design issues and user
requirements.
• Interprocess Communication - Synchronous and Asynchronous,
Client-server communication, Group communication.
• Remote Procedure Call (RPC) - Design issues & Implementation.
• Distributed System Design issues & Implementation.
• File Services Design issues, Implementations and case studies.
• Name Service-Design issues and case studies.
• Time and Co-ordination Physical & Logical Clocks, Distributed
Co-ordination.
• Replication issues and implementations.
• Shared data and Transactions, Distributed transactions,
concurrency control.
• Recovery and Fault Tolerance.
• Security-Design issues and case studies.
 References
1. Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg, Distributed
Systems-Concepts and Design, Pearson Education
Asia, 3rd Edition,2002
2. P K Sinha, Distibuted Operating System, PHI, IEEE
Press
3. Singhal and Shivaratri, Advanced Concepts in
Operating Systems, TMH, 2001
4. Tanenbaum and Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles
and Paradigms, Pearson Education,2004
5. Gerard Tel, Distributed Algorithms, Cambridge Univ
Press, 2nd Edition,2004
 Evaluation Plan

slno Component marks

1 End Term Exam 100
2 Mid Term Exam 50
3 Class Test/Term paper (seminar, 50
report)/Assignment
Total : 200
 Topic 1
• Definitions
• Motivations
• Consequences
• Examples of DS
• Advantages and Disadvantages of DS
• Design Challenges/Issues
 What is a distributed system?
• A collection of independent computers that
appear to the users as a single computer.
(Andrew Tannenbaum)
• Autonomous computers.
• Many components
– connected by a network
– sharing resources.
– software specifically designed to provide an
integrated computing facility
 Contd… (Coulouris, et al)
• System of networked computers that
communicate and coordinate their actions only
by passing messages
• Concurrent execution of programs
• No global clock
• Components fail independently of one another
By running a distributed system software the computers
are enabled to:
- coordinate their activities
- share resources: hardware, software, data.
 Another definition (Lamport)
• “You know you have a distributed system when
the crash of a computer you’ve never heard of
stops you from getting any work done.”
– inter-dependencies
– shared state
– independent failure of components
 Enslow’s Definition

• DS = Distributed (h/w + control + data)

• A system could be classified as a DS if all 3
categories (h/w, control & data) reach a certain
degree of decentralization.
 Motivation
• Two Advances in the mid 80s
– Powerful micro-processor:
• 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit
• x86 family, 68k family, Alpha chip
• Clock rate: 8Mhz up to 600+Mhz
– Computer network
• Local Area Network (LAN), Wide Area Network (WAN),
MAN, Wireless Network
• Network type:  Ethernet, Token-bus, Token-ring, ATM,
Fast-Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel
• Transfer rate: 64 kbps up to 1Gbps
 Motivation for Distribution
• People & information are distributed

• Functional distribution: computers have different functional

capabilities.
– Client / server
– Host / terminal
– Data gathering / data processing

Inherent distribution stemming from the application domain, e.g.

– cash register and inventory systems for supermarket chains
– computer supported collaborative work
 Contd…
• Share resources
sharing of resources with specific functionalities
–Data sharing: Allow many users access to a common database
–Device sharing: Allow many users to share expensive peripherals.

• Performance & cost

Load distribution / balancing: assign tasks to
processors such that the overall system performance is
optimized.
Replication of processing power: independent processors
working on the same task
Economics: collections of microprocessors offer a
better price/performance ratio than large mainframes
 Contd…

• Personalise environments
• Location independence
• Modularity & expandability
• Availability & reliability
• Scalability
Communication: Make human-to-human communication easier
-- Email.
 Consequences
Distributed systems are concurrent systems

– Every software or hardware component is

autonomous
– Components execute concurrent tasks
– Synchronization and coordination by
message passing
– Sharing of resources
Deadlocks
 Contd…
Absence of a global clock
– Due to message passing there are limits on the
precision with which processes in a distributed system
can synchronize their clocks (physical clock
synchronization)

Absence of a global state

– In the general case, there is no single process in the
distributed system that would have a knowledge of
the current global state of the system
Due to concurrency and message passing communication
 Contd…
Specific failure modes
– Processes run autonomously, in isolation
Failures of individual processes may remain
undetected
Individual processes may be unaware of
failures in the system context
 Examples of Distributed Systems

• A number of workstations plus a pool of

processors in a department’s network.

If the system as a whole looked and acted like a single

processor timesharing system, it would qualify as a
distributed system.
 Examples (cont’d)

• The Internet
– Heterogeneous network of computers and
applications
– Implemented through the Internet Protocol Stack
– Typical configuration:
 A typical portion of the Internet

intranet 

 ISP

backbone

satellite link

desktop computer:
server:
network link:
 Examples (cont’d)
• Intranets
– Locally administered network
– Usually proprietary (e.g., the University campus
network)
– Interfaces with the Internet
Firewalls
– Provides services internally and externally
 A typical intranet

email server Desktop

computers
print and other servers

Local area
Web server network

email server
print
File server
other servers
the rest of
the Internet
router/firewall
 Examples (cont’d)
• Distributed Multimedia-Systems

Heterogeneous data sources and sinks that need to be

synchronized in real time
* Video * Audio * Text
Examples
Video-conferencing
Video and audio on demand
 Examples (cont’d)
• Embedded systems

– Avionics control systems

Flight management systems in aircraft

– Automotive control systems

Mercedes S-Klasse automobiles these
days are equipped with 50+ autonomous
embedded processors
 Examples (cont’d)
• Network File Systems
– Architecture to access file systems across a network
– Famous example
Network File System (NFS), originally developed by SUN
Microsystems for remote access support in a UNIX context
The World Wide Web
– Open client-server architecture implemented on top of the
Internet
– Shared resouces
Information, uniquely identified through a Uniform
Resource Locator (URL)
 Examples (cont’d)
• Automated banking systems
• 1 central office:
– Clients at different ATMs may access the same
accounts simultaneously
• 2 central offices:
– ATMs use nearest central office
– Each office acts as a backup of the other
– Outstanding transactions ?
– Network failures ?
Advantages of Distributed Systems
• Performance: very often a collection of
processors can provide higher performance
(and better price/performance ratio) than a
centralized computer.
• Distribution: many applications involve, by their
nature, spatially separated machines
(banking, commercial, automotive system ).
• Reliability (fault tolerance): if some of the
machines crash, the system can survive .
• Incremental growth: as requirements on
processing power grow, new machines can be
added incrementally.
Advantages of Distributed Systems
• Sharing of data/resources: shared data is
essential to many applications ( banking,
computer supported cooperative work,
reservation systems); other resources can be
also shared (e.g. expensive printers).
• Communication: facilitates human-to-human
communication.
Disadvantages of Distributed Systems

• Difficulties of developing distributed software:

how should operating systems, programming
languages and applications look like?
• Networking problems: several problems are
created by the network infrastructure, which have
to be dealt with: loss of
messages,overloading, ...
• Security problems: sharing generates the
problem of data security.
Design Issues with Distributed Systems
Design issues that arise specifically from the
distributed nature of the application:
– Transparency
– Communication
– Performance & scalability
– Heterogeneity
– Openness
– Reliability & fault tolerance
– Security
 Transparency
– How to achieve the single system image?
– How to "fool" everyone into thinking that the
collection of machines is a "simple" computer?
• Access transparency: local and remote resources are
accessed using identical operations.
• Location transparency: users cannot tell where
hardware and software resources (CPUs, files, data bases)
are located; the name of the resource shouldn’t encode the
location of the resource.
• Migration (mobility) transparency: resources should be free to
move from one location to another without having their names changed .
 Transparency (Contd..)
• Replication transparency: the system is free to make
additional copies of files and other resources (for purpose of
performance and/or reliability), without the users noticing.
• Concurrency transparency: the users will not notice the
existence of other users in the system (even if they access
the same resources).
• Failure transparency: applications should be able to
complete their task despite failures occurring in certain
components of the system.
• Performance transparency: load variation should not
lead to performance degradation. This could be achieved by
automatic reconfiguration as response to changes of the
load; it is difficult to achieve.
• Scalability transparency: the system should be able to add
users without degrading its performance
 Communication
• Components of a distributed system have to communicate
in order to interact. This implies support at two levels:
– Networking infrastructure (interconnections & network software).
– Appropriate communication primitives and models and their
implementation:
• communication primitives:
- send
- receive
- remote procedure call (RPC)
• communication models
- client-server communication: implies a message exchange between
two processes: the process which requests a service and the one which
provides it;
- group muticast: the target of a message is a set of processes, which
are members of a given group.
 Performance and Scalability
Several factors are influencing the performance of a
distributed system:
• The performance of individual workstations.
• The speed of the communication infrastructure.
• Extent to which reliability (fault tolerance) is provided (replication and
preservation of coherence imply large overheads).
• Flexibility in workload allocation: for example, idle processors
(workstations) could be allocated automatically to a user’s task.
Scalability:The system should remain efficient even with a significant
increase in the number of users and resources connected:
• cost of adding resources should be reasonable;
• performance loss with increased number of users and resources should
be controlled;
• software resources should not run out (number of bits allocated to
addresses, number of entries in tables, etc.)
 Heterogeneity
• Distributed applications are typically heterogeneous:
– different hardware: mainframes, workstations,PCs,
servers, etc.;
– different software: UNIX, MSWindows, IBM
OS/2,Real-time OSs, etc. (e.g., operating systems,
compare UNIX socket and Winsock calls);
– unconventional devices: teller machines, telephone
switches, robots, manufacturing systems, etc.;
– diverse networks and protocols: Ethernet, FDDI,
ATM, TCP/IP, Novell Netware, etc.
– programming languages (in particular, data
representations)
The solution:
Middleware, an additional software layer to mask heterogeneity
 Heterogeneity

• Some approaches
1. Middleware (e.g., CORBA): transparency of
network, hardware, software and programming
language heterogeneity
2. Mobile Code (e.g., JAVA): transparency from
hardware, software and programming language
heterogeneity through virtual machine concept
 Openness
• One of the important features of distributed
systems is openness and flexibility:
– every service is equally accessible to every client (local
or remote);
– it is easy to implement, install and debug new
services;
– users can write and install their own services.
• Key aspect of openness:
- Standard interfaces and protocols (like Internet
communication protocols)
- Support of heterogeneity (by adequate middleware, like
CORBA)
 Openness(Cont’d.)

Applications & Services

Middleware

Operating System Platform1 Operating System

Hardware: Platform2 Hardware:

Comp & Nw Comp & Nw

Node1 Node2

Software Architecture
 Reliability and Fault Tolerance
One of the main goals of building distributed
systems is improvement of reliability.
Availability: If machines go down, the system
should work with the reduced amount of
resources.
• There should be a very small number of critical resources;
critical resources: resources which have to be up in order
the distributed system to work.
• Key pieces of hardware and software (critical resources)
should be replicated if one of them fails another one
takes up - redundancy.
Data on the system must not be lost, and copies stored
redundantly on different servers must be kept consistent.
• The more copies kept, the better the availability, but
keeping consistency becomes more difficult.
Reliability and Fault Tolerance
Fault-tolerance is a main issue related
to reliability: the system has to detect
faults and act in a reasonable way:
• mask the fault: continue to work with
possibly reduced performance but
without loss of data/information.
• fail gracefully: react to the fault in a
predictable way and possibly stop
functionality for a short period, but
without loss of data/information.
 Security
Security of information resources:
1. Confidentiality: Protection against
disclosure to unauthorized person
2. Integrity: Protection against alteration and
corruption
3. Availability: Keep the resource accessible.
The appropriate use of resources by different
users has to be guaranteed.
Distributed systems should allow communication between
programs/users/resources on different computers .

Security risks associated with free access.