Distributed system

A distributed system is one in which components located at networked computers communicate and
coordinate their actions only by passing messages. This definition leads to the following especially significant
characteristics of distributed systems: concurrency of components, lack of a global clock and independent
failures of components.
Webcasting
Webcasting is an application of distributed multimedia technology. Webcasting is the ability to broadcast
continuous media, typically audio or video, over the Internet.
Clock Drift Rate
The term clock drift rate refers to the rate at which a computer clock deviates from a perfect reference clock.
Even if the clocks on all the computers in a distributed system are set to the same time initially, their clocks will
eventually vary quite significantly unless corrections are applied.
1. Openness
The openness of distributed systems is determined primarily by the degree to which new resource-sharing
services can be added and be made available for use by a variety of client programs.

• Open systems are characterized by the fact that their key interfaces are published.
• Open distributed systems are based on the provision of a uniform communication mechanism and
published interfaces for access to shared resources.
• Open distributed systems can be constructed from heterogeneous hardware and software, possibly from
different vendors. But the conformance of each component to the published standard must be carefully
tested and verified if the system is to work correctly.
2. Scalability
Distributed systems operate effectively and efficiently at many different scales, ranging from a small intranet
to the Internet. A system is described as scalable if it will remain effective when there is a significant increase in
the number of resources and the number of users.
The design of scalable distributed systems presents the following challenges:
Controlling the cost of physical resources: As the demand for a resource grows, it should be possible to extend
the system, at reasonable cost, to meet it. For example, the frequency with which files are accessed in an intranet
is likely to grow as the number of users and computers increases. It must be possible to add server computers to
avoid the performance bottleneck that would arise if a single file server had to handle all file access requests.
Controlling the performance loss: Consider the management of a set of data whose size is proportional to the
number of users or resources in the system - for example, the table with the correspondence between the domain
names of computers and their Internet addresses held by the Domain Name System, which is used mainly to look
up DNS names such as www.amazon.com. Algorithms that use hierarchic structures scale better than those that
use linear structures.
Preventing software resources running out: An example of lack of scalability is shown by the numbers used as
Internet (IP) addresses. The supply of available Internet addresses is running out. For this reason, a new version of
the protocol with 128-bit Internet addresses is being adopted, and this will require modifications to many software
components.
3. Transparency
Transparency is defined as the concealment from the user and the application programmer of the separation of
components in a distributed system, so that the system is perceived as a whole rather than as a collection of
independent components.

• Access transparency enables local and remote resources to be accessed using identical operations.
• Location transparency enables resources to be accessed without knowledge of their physical or network
location (for example, which building or IP address).
• Concurrency transparency enables several processes to operate concurrently using shared resources
without interference between them.
• Replication transparency enables multiple instances of resources to be used to increase reliability and
performance without knowledge of the replicas by users or application programmers.
• Failure transparency enables the concealment of faults, allowing users and application programs to
complete their tasks despite the failure of hardware or software components.
• Mobility transparency allows the movement of resources and clients within a system without affecting
the operation of users or programs.
• Performance transparency allows the system to be reconfigured to improve performance as loads vary.
• Scaling transparency allows the system and applications to expand in scale without change to the system
structure or the application algorithms.

4. Contemporary distributed systems

In the early internet scale distributed systems, nodes were typically desktop computers and therefore relatively
static, discrete and autonomous. The key trends have resulted in significant further developments in physical
models:

• The emergence of mobile computing has led to physical models where nodes such as laptops or smart
phones may move from location to location in a distributed system, leading to the need for added
capabilities such as service discovery and support for spontaneous interoperation.
• The emergence of ubiquitous computing has led to a move from discrete nodes to architectures where
computers are embedded in everyday objects and in the surrounding environment (for example, in washing
machines or in smart homes more generally).
• The emergence of cloud computing and, in particular, cluster architectures has led to a move from
autonomous nodes performing a given role to pools of nodes that together provide a given service.

5. Performance of communication channels

Communication over a computer network has the following performance characteristics relating to latency,
bandwidth and jitter:
• The delay between the start of a message's transmission from one process and the beginning of its receipt by
another is referred to as latency. The latency includes:
✓ The time taken for the first of a string of bits transmitted through a network to reach its destination. For
example, the latency for the transmission of a message through a satellite link is the time for a radio signal
to travel to the satellite and back.
✓ The delay in accessing the network, which increases significantly when the network is heavily loaded. For
example, for Ethernet transmission the sending station waits for the network to be free of traffic.
✓ The time taken by the operating system communication services at both the sending and the receiving
processes, which varies according to the current load on the operating systems.
• The bandwidth of a computer network is the total amount of information that can be transmitted over it in a
given time.
• Jitter is the variation in the time taken to deliver a series of messages. Jitter is relevant to multimedia data.

6. Synchronous distributed systems: Hadzilacos and Toueg [1994] define a synchronous distributed system to
be one in which the following bounds are defined:

• The time to execute each 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 a known bound.

7. An asynchronous distributed system is one in which there are no bounds on:

• Process execution speeds - for example, one process step may take only a picosecond and another a
century; all that can be said is that each step may take an arbitrarily long time.
• Message transmission delays– for example, one message from process A to process B may be delivered
in negligible time and another may take several years. In other words, a message may be received after an
arbitrarily long time.
• Clock drift rates - again, the drift rate of a clock is arbitrary.

8. Reliability of one-to-one communication

The term reliable communication is defined in terms of validity and integrity as follows:
Validity: Any message in the outgoing message buffer is eventually delivered to the incoming message buffer.
Integrity: The message received is identical to one sent, and no messages are delivered twice.
The threats to integrity come from two independent sources:
• Any protocol that retransmits messages but does not reject a message that arrives twice. Protocols can attach
sequence numbers to messages so as to detect those that are delivered twice.
• Malicious users that may inject spurious messages, replay old messages or tamper with messages. Security
measures can be taken to maintain the integrity property in the face of such attacks.