ICS4014 / BTC 4201 – Distributed Systems

Lecture Topic: Consistency and Replication with Breakout Sessions (12 Rooms)
1. Breakout Room #1, 2 and 3:
a. Why is data replication of data necessary for Distributed Environment?

b. What are replicas? Why are they referred to as replicas? Why do we say that replicas must
be consistent for replication of data?

c. What is a consistency model? What differentiate among the consistency models? Why is
this difference important in the implementation model?

d. How does an object server increase the number of services it provides? Given that different
clients require these services, what are the potential problems that can occur?

2. Breakout Room #4, 5 and 6

a. What is the difference between objects implementations that are capable handling
concurrent invocations and those are not?

b. What can be done for consistency if the distributed objects cannot handle concurrent
invocations? How has Java implemented this issue of handling concurrent invocations?

c. Replicas need more synchronization to ensure that concurrent invocations lead to

consistent results. What are the two techniques this synchronization can be done? Which
technique is easier for programmers? Why?

d. Which of the two techniques in (c) above can have widespread application in your opinion?
Why?

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3. Breakout Room #7, 8 and 9
a. What do we mean by replication of data? Is it necessary for Distributed Environment? Why
or why not?

b. After replication, why synchronization the next major problem? How do we solve this
problem of synchronization?

c. Why do is replication and caching considered widely as scaling technique? What do we

mean by scalability here? What are some of the issues arise with two scaling techniques?

d. What is a consistency model or consistency semantic? What is the purpose of all the
consistency models?

e. In case of processing involved in transactions, what we consider as data-centric consistency

model implementation? How then do we ensure all the replicas are consistent?

4. Breakout Room #10, 11 and 12

a. How does the strict consistency model expected to work? Why is difficult to implement
strict consistency model?

b. What makes sequential consistency a weaker consistency model than strict consistency
model? Why is linearizability is weaker than strict consistency but stronger than sequential
consistency? What do was that a data store is linearizable?

c. In the implementation of consistency models, what do we mean by data coherence and

program order violation? Why are these important in the determining the consistency
model?

d. What is the difference between causally related and concurrent operations in terms on
consistency models implementation? Does it matter whether the operations are causally
related or concurrent in some of the consistency models? Why?

e. What do we mean by the violation of consistency model? Are these violations same?