Unit 2: Introduction to distributed systems

1. What is Distributed System? Give Advantages 2. What are the goals of distributed system? 3. What are the advantages of distributed systems over centralized systems? 4. Explain the various classification schemes for multiple CPU computer systems. 5. Explain the taxonomy of parallel and distributed computer systems. 6. What are the advantages of distributed systems over independent PCs? 7. What are the disadvantages of distributed systems? 8. Differentiate between bus based multiprocessors and bus based multicomputers. 9. Differentiate between switch based multiprocessors and switch based multicomputers. 10. Differentiate between tightly coupled and loosely coupled systems. 11. Explain the different combinations of hardware and software. 12. Differentiate between network operating systems and true distributed systems. 13. Compare and contrast the three different ways of organizing n CFUs. 14. Explain the key design issues of distributed operating system. 15. What are the different kinds of transparency in a distributed system? 16. Differentiate between Monolithic and Micro Kernel. 17. What are the potential bottlenecks that designers should try to avoid in very large distributed system? 18. How does distributed operating system algorithm differentiate between de-centralized algorithms? 19. What are the primary tasks of a microkernel? 20. Concurrency transparency is a desirable goal for distributed systems. Do centralized systems have this property automatically?

Communication in Distributed Systems

1. What is the difference between a distributed system and uniprocessor systems? Elaborate. 2. Give a brief note on layered protocols. 3. What is Asynchronous Transfer Mode? 4. How is ATM different from traditional connection and connectionless networks? 5. Explain the ATM Reference model in detail. 6. What are the characteristics of the ATM Layer? 7. Give the structure of the user to network cell header layout 8. For which classes of traffic was adaptation layers defined? 9. Explain ATM switching network. 10. What is client server model? Explain with a diagram.

11. What are clients and servers? Explain with an example. 12. What are the different addressing processes for client server model? What are the problems related with these issues? 13. Differentiate between blocking and nonblocking primitives. 14. Differentiate between buffered and unbuffered primitives. 15. Differentiate between reliable and unreliable primitives. 16. What are the different approaches of handling lost messages in client server model? 17. What are the four design issues in client server model? 18. What are the different packet types used in client server protocols? Explain with examples. 19. What is RPC? Explain the basic RPC Operation. 20. Differentiate between call by value and call by reference. 21. What are the different parameter passing mechanisms? 22. Explain calls and messages in RPC. 23. What are the steps involved in performing RPC? 24. Explain dynamic binding. 25. What are the different classes of failures that can occur in RPC systems? 26. What are the implementation issues involved in RPC? 27. What is pipeline? Explain different approaches to avoid client-client interface. 28. What is group communication? 29. What are the design issues related to group communication? 30. Differentiate between closed groups and open groups. 31. Differentiate between peer groups and hierarchical groups. 32. What are the methods needed for creating and deleting groups? 33. Explain group membership. Explain issues related to it. 34. Give a brief note on message ordering. 35. What are inconsistencies involved in overlapping groups. 36. What is a synchronous system? Differentiate between loose synchrony and virtual synchrony. 37. What are the communication primitives in ISIS? 38. What is meant by open system? Why are some systems not open? 39. What is the difference between a connection oriented and connectionless communication protocol? 40. How can atomic broadcast be used to manage group membership?

Unit 3: Synchronization in Distributed systems

1. What is the need for clock synchronization in distributed systems?

2. Explain logical clocks. 3. Explain Lamports algorithm. How does it correct the clocks? 4. What is a happened before relation? 5. What are physical clocks? What are the issues using multiple physical clocks? 6. Explain Cristians algorithm. 7. Elaborate on Berkeley algorithm. 8. What are averaging algorithms? 9. Summarize algorithms that utilize synchronized clocks. 10. What is Mutual exclusion? 11. Differentiate between a centralized algorithm and a distributed algorithm. 12. Explain the token ring algorithm. 13. Compare and contrast different algorithms: centralized, distributed and token ring. 14. What are the election algorithms? 15. Explain Bully algorithm. 16. Elaborate on election algorithm using a ring. 17. What are atomic transactions? 18. What are the different transaction primitives? 19. What are the essential properties of transactions? 20. What are nested transactions? 21. What is a two phase commit protocol? 22. What is concurrency control? Explain the different algorithms. 23. What are deadlocks? What are the various strategies involved in handling deadlocks? 24. Explain distributed deadlock detection. 25. Differentiate between distributed and centralized deadlock detection. 26. Explain distributed deadlock prevention. 27. What are the different deadlock prevention algorithms? 28. Does using time stamping for concurrency control ensure serializability? Discuss. 29. Give the full algorithm for whether an attempt to lock a file should succeed or fail. Consider both read and write locks, and the possibility that the file was unlocked read locked, or write locked. 30. Explain Ricart and Agarwalas algorithm. What are the problems involved?

Processes and Processors in DS

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Differentiate between fault tolerant and real time systems. Differentiate between per thread and per process concepts. Explain thread usage. What are the three organization models of threads in a process? What are the different ways to construct a server?

6. What are the design issues for threads packages? 7. Explain the usage of mutexes and condition variables. 8. What are the conflicts between threads over the use of a global variables? 9. What is a reader-writer problem? What are the various solutions to this problem? 10. What are the two main ways to implement a threads package? 11. Explain the general structure for implementing thread. 12. What are the advantages and disadvantages of user level threads? 13. What are the advantages and disadvantage of kernel level threads? 14. Describe an approach that combines the advantages of user level and kernel level threads. 15. What are scheduler activations? 16. Explain the different techniques involved in speeding up RPC process using threads. 17. What is a system model? Explain two of them. 18. Differentiate between workstation and processor pool model. 19. Differentiate between diskless and diskful workstations. Which is more popular and why? 20. Compare and contrast diskless and diskful models. 21. What are the different ways the disks can be used when workstations have private disks? 22. What are the key issues involved in idle workstations? 23. Describe registry based algorithm for finding and using idle workstations. 24. How are the algorithms used to locate idle workstations divided? 25. Differentiate between client driver and server driven idle workstations. 26. Explain processor pool model. 27. Describe hybrid model. 28. What are the different allocation models used in allocating processor? 29. What are the design issues related to processor allocation algorithms? 30. Describe the implementation issues involved in processor allocation algorithms 31. Describe algorithms with example: a. Graph theoretic deterministic algorithm b. Centralized algorithm c. Hierarchical algorithm d. Heuristic algorithm e. Bidding algorithm 32. Describe scheduling in distributed systems. 33. Differentiate between faults and failures. 34. What are component faults? 35. What are the two types of processor faults? 36. Differentiate between fail-silent faults and byzantine faults. 37. Differentiate between synchronous and asynchronous systems. 38. What is the general approach to fault tolerance? 39. What are the three types of redundancy ? 40. What are the issues related to redundancy?

41. Explain active replication. 42. Describe state machine approach. 43. What is triple modular redundancy? 44. What is atomic broadcast problem? 45. How is fault tolerance possible with primary backup? 46. Give a simple primary backup protocol on a write operation. 47. What are the goals of distributed agreement algorithms in faulty systems? 48. Describe Byzatines generals problem. 49. What are real time distributed systems? 50. What are the two types of real time systems? 51. Differentiate between soft and hard real time systems. 52. Describe the design issues related to real time distributed systems. 53. Differentiate between event triggered and time triggered systems. 54. Explain TDMA. 55. How is communication in real time distributed systems different from communication in other distributed systems? 56. Explain Time Triggered Protocol. 57. Give the structure of TTP packet. 58. Explain real time scheduling. 59. What are the parameters use to characterize real time scheduling algorithms? 60. Differentiate between dynamic and static scheduling.

Unit 4: Distributed File Systems

1. Differentiate between file service and file server. 2. What is a file? 3. How are file services categorized? 4. Differentiate between upload/download model and remote access model. 5. Differentiate file with directory. 6. What is directory graph? 7. What are the key issues involved in designing distributed file system? 8. What is the problem faced in naming? 9. What are the common approaches to file and directory naming in a distributed system? 10. Explain two level naming. 11. Define the semantics of reading and writing precisely to avoid problems. 12. What are the different ways of dealing with the shared files in a distributed system?

13. Differentiate between static and dynamic measurements. 14. What are the problems that occur with measurements of any system? 15. What are the different file system properties? 16. What are the different ways of organizing file and directory servers? 17. What are the implementation issues related to organizing file and directory servers? 18. Differentiate between iterative lookup and automatic lookup. 19. Compare and contrast stateless and stateful servers. 20. Explain caching. 21. What are the different places where we can store files? 22. What are the various ways of doing caching in client memory? 23. Explain cache consistency. 24. Explain different algorithms for managing a client file cache. 25. What are the reasons for offering replication service ? 26. Compare and contrast explicit file replication, lazy file replication and file replication using a group. 27. Explain voting algorithm. 28. What are update protocols? 29. Explain primary copy replication. 30. What are the trends in distributed file systems? 31. Describe the hardware scheme to update shared files. 32. What are mobile users? 33. Name two useful properties that immutable files have. 34. Why do some distributed systems use two level naming?

Distributed Shared Memory

1. 2. 3. 4.

What is shared memory? Explain hypothetical shard memory multiprocessor. Explain different type of multiprocessors. What are the properties of of multiprocessors using a cache consistency protocol?