CS 843 Distributed Computing Systems - Homewor 1 - Name:_________________ Assigned: Wednesday, February 5 Due: Wednesday, February 12 (in class) Please

show all wor on a separate sheet attached to this sheet. For each question write ey points. (50 points) 1. What are the goals to build a distributed system? (5 points) Ans: o o o o Connecting users and resources Transparency Openness Scalability

2. Explain what is meant by transparency in a distributed system, and give examples of different types of transparency. (10 points) Ans: Distribution transparency is the phenomenon by which distribution aspects in a system are hidden from users and applications. Examples include access transparency, location transparency, migration transparency, relocation transparency, replication transparency, concurrency transparency, failure transparency, and persistence transparency. 3. What is the difference between a networ operating system and middleware-based distributed operating system? Find one networ operating system and one middleware-based distributed operating system and and describe their features. (10 points) Ans: A networ operating system connects different independent computers that each have their own operating system so that users can easily use the services available on each computer. The users in a networ operating system now different machines and remote services whereas these are hidden from the users in a middleware-based distributed operating system. 4. What is the reason for developing distributed shared memory systems? Point out the difficulties to build a distributed shared memory system. (10 points) Ans: The main reason is that writing parallel and distributed programs based on message-passing primitives is much harder than being able to use shared memory for communication. Efficiency of DSM systems is hindered by the fact, no matter what you do, page transfers across the networ need to ta e place. If pages are shared by different processors, it is quite easy to get into a state similar to thrashing in virtual memory systems. In the end, DSM systems can never be faster than message-passing solutions, and will generally be slower due to the overhead incurred by eeping trac of where pages are.

5. Why are transport-level communication services often inappropriate for building distributed applications? (5 points) Ans: They hardly offer distribution transparency meaning that application developers are required to pay significant attention to implementing communication, often leading to proprietary solutions. The effect is that distributed applications, built directly on top of soc ets are difficult to port and to interoperate with other applications. 6. Consider the following code: int f(x,y) { x = 5; y = y+3; return(x+y); } main() { int a, b; a = 3; b = f(a,a); printf("a = %d, b = %d \n",a,b); } What will be printed if the parameters are passed using: (a) call-by-value? (b) call-by-reference ? (c) call-by-copy/restore ? Which of the above parameter passing method(s) cannot be easily implemented using remote procedure calls? Explain. (10 points) Ans: 1)(a) a = 3, b = 11 (b) a = 8, b = 16 (c) a = 5, b = 11 (Pascal sematics) or a = 6, b = 11 (C sematics) 2) Call-by-reference cannot be easily implemented because the reference addresses are different from the local and remote machines.