Distributed Systems Question Bank 2013-14

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UNIT 1
Chapter 1
1. Define distributed systems. What are the significant issues of the distributed
systems?
2. What are different application domains of distributed systems? Explain.
3. Discuss the different trends in distributed systems.
4. Enumerate the highlights of complex distributed system installations.
5. Explain the different influential trends in distributed systems.
6. What is Ubiquitous Computing? Explain.
7. What are distributed multimedia systems?
8. What is resource sharing? Explain.
9. What are the challenges in Distributed System?
10. What are the different types of failures and how are they dealt in distributed systems?
11. What are different types of transparencies required in distributed systems?
12. Write a short note on quality of service in distributed systems.
Chapter 2
13. What are different types of models for developing distributed systems? Explain each
model in brief.
14. Write a short note on Architectural Model.
15. What is cache? Explain.
16. What are fundamental models for distributed system? What is the purpose of such
models?
17. Write a short note on Interaction Model.
18. Explain the failure model of distributed system in detail.
19. Explain the security model of distributed system in detail.
20. Describe possible occurrences of each of the main types of security threat (threats
to processes, threats to communication channels, denial of service) that might occur
in the Internet.
Unit 2
Chapter 3
21. Explain packet transmission and data streaming.
22. Explain different switching schemes.
23. What is classless inter-domain routing? Explain.
24. What is Network Address Translation? Explain with an example.
25. Discuss the different networking issues for distributed systems.
26. Explain RIP algorithm with an example.
27. How are IPv4 addresses classified in IPv4 classful addressing? Explain.
28. Explain IPv6.
29. What is mobile IP? How does Mobile routing take place? Explain.
30. Enumerate the features of TCP.
31. What is a firewall? What are its different configurations?
32. What is Ethernet? What are different Ethernet standards?
33. Explain the following with respect to Ethernet:
Packet Collisions, Efficiency, Physical implementations
34. Write a short note on IEEE 802.11i wireless LAN.
35. Explain the IEEE 802.15.1 bluetooth wireless personal area network.
36. Explain the Bluetooth frame structure.
Chapter 4:
37. What are the characteristics of interprocess communications?
38. Explain the Java API for UDP datagram communication.
39. Explain the Java API for TCP stream communication.
40. What is marshalling? Explain.
Distributed Systems Question Bank 2013-14
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41. What is CORBAs common Data Representation? Explain.
42. What is object serialization? How does Java serialize objects?
43. What is XML? Explain the following with respect to XML:
Entities, Attributes, Names, Binary Data, CDATA, XML Prolog, Name spaces and
schemas.
44. Multicast messages provide a useful infrastructure for constructing distributed
Systems What are the characteristics on such systems?
45. Explain with examples the effects of reliability and ordering of multicast.
46. What is network virtualization? What are overlay networks? What are advantages
and disadvantages of overlay networks?
47. Explain SKYPE as an example of overlay network.
48. Explain Message Passing Interface.
Unit 3
Chapter 5
49. Explain the request reply protocol along with its operations and message structure.
50. What are the different styles of exchange protocols?
51. Why is TCP preferred to implement request-reply protocol? Explain HTTP as an
example of request-reply protocol.
52. What ire Remote Procedure Call? Discuss the design issues for RPC.
53. How is RPC implemented?
54. What is remote method invocation? What are the commonalities and differences
between RPC and RMI?
55. What are the design issues for RMI?
56. Compare single-object and distributed object models.
57. How is RMI implemented?
58. Explain in detail, distributed garbage collection.
59. Explain Java implementation of RMI.
Chapter 6
60. What is Indirect Communication? Explain space and time coupling and uncoupling.
61. What is group communication? What are the key areas of applications of group
communication? Explain the programming model for group communication.
62. Discuss the implementation issues with group communication services.
63. What are publish subscribe systems? What are their applications? Explain with
example.
64. Explain the characteristics of publish subscribe systems.
65. Explain the programming model for publish subscribe systems.
66. What are the implementation issues in publish subscribe systems?
67. Explain the architecture of publish subscribe systems.
68. What are message queues? Explain the programming model offered by message
queues.
69. Discuss the implementation issues with message queues.
70. What is distributed shared memory? Explain.
71. Compare message passing and distributed shared memory approaches.
72. What is tuple space communication? Explain the programming model of tuple
space communication.
73. What are the implementation issues with tuple space communication?
Chapter 9
74. What are web services? What are the components of web services?
75. Explain the following with respect to web services:
Loose coupling, Representation of messages, Service references, activation of
services, transparency.
76. What is SOAP? How is SOAP message carried?
Distributed Systems Question Bank 2013-14
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77. Write a short note on Web Service: Reliable messaging.
78. Compare web services with distributed object model.
79. Explain Web Service Description Language Request and Reply messages.
80. Write a short note on Web Service Description Language.
81. What is UDDI? What does it provide? Explain.
82. What type of security must be provided by XML?
83. What is choreography? What are its requirements? What features should be
included in choreographic languages?
84. What are different applications of choreography? Explain.
85. What is Service-Oriented Architecture? Explain.
86. What is Grid? What are its requirements? What is Grid Middleware?
87. What is cloud computing? Explain with examples.
Unit 4
Chapter 13
88. Explain the following:
Uniform resource identifiers, Uniform resource locators, Uniform resource names.
89. What is name service? What are its requirements?
90. What is a name space? What is an alias? What is naming domain? Explain.
91. Write a short note on combining and customizing name spaces.
92. What is name resolution? What are the different ways of resolving names? Explain.
93. Explain the DNS name service and bind implementation of DNS.
94. Explain different directory services.
95. Explain the Global Name Service.
96. Explain X.500 directory service.
Chapter 14
97. Explain the terms:
Clocks, Clock Skew, Clock Drift, Co-ordinated Universal Time.
98. What are the different ways of synchronizing physical clocks? Explain.
99. Explain Christians method for synchronizing clocks.
100. Explain the Berkley algorithm.
101. What is Network Time Protocol? What are its aims and features?
102. Explain Logical time and logical clocks.
103. What is vector clock? Explain.
104. Explain with examples how the global properties of an object are detected.
105. Explain global states and consistent cuts with example.
106. Explain the snapshot algorithm of Chandy and Lamport.
107. Write a short note on distributed debugging.
108. What is a failure detector? What are its types? Explain.
109. What is mutual exclusion? How is the performance of algorithms of mutual
exclusions evaluated?
110. Explain the central server algorithm for mutual exclusion.
111. Explain the ring based algorithm for mutual exclusion.
112. Explain an algorithm using multicast and logical clocks for mutual exclusion.
113. Explain Maekawas voting algorithm.
114. What is an election algorithm? Explain.
115. Explain ring based election algorithm.
116. Explain the bully algorithm.
Chapter 15
117. Explain the basic multicast algorithm and reliable multicast algorithm.
118. How is reliable multicast implemented over basic multicast and IP multicast?
119. Explain the different types of ordering of multicasts messages in non-overlapping
groups.
Distributed Systems Question Bank 2013-14
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120. Explain FIFO ordering of multicast messages.
121. Explain total ordering of multicast messages.
122. Explain the ISIS algorithm for total ordering of multicast messages.
123. How is causal ordering implemented for ordering of multicast messages? Explain.
124. Explain the different types of ordering of multicasts messages in overlapping
groups.
125. Define consenses problem. What are the requirements of consenses algorithm?
126. Explain the following variants of consenses problem:
Byzantine generals problem and Interactive consistency problem.
127. Write and explain the algorithm for consenses in synchronous system.
128. Discuss the Byzantine generals problem in a synchronous system.
129. Discuss the impossibility in asynchronous systems.
Unit 5
Chapter 17
130. Explain the flat and nested transactions in distributed systems.
131. Explain the role of co-ordinator in distributed transaction.
132. Explain the two-phase commit protocol.
133. Explain two-phase commit protocol for nested transactions.
134. Explain hierarchic and flat two-phase commit protocols.
135. What are the different ways to control concurrency in distributed transactions?
Explain with examples.
136. What is distributed deadlock? Explain with example.
137. Explain phantom deadlocks.
138. Explain edge chasing deadlock detection technique in distributed systems.
139. How are transactions recovered in distributed systems? What are the tasks or
recovery manager?
140. Explain the logging technique used for recovering transactions in distributed
systems.
141. Explain The need for transaction status and intentions list entries in a recovery file.
142. How is recovery of two-phase commit protocol done in a distributed transaction?
Explain.
Chapter 19
143. What is ubiquitous computing? Explain with examples.
144. What are volatile systems? Explain with examples.
145. Explain Network bootstrapping and association. State the boundary principle.
146. What are the issues to be dealt with in the design of discovery service? Explain.
147. Explain the different techniques of physical association between humans and
computer.
148. What are the different tuple spaces based programming systems developed for
mobile and ubiquitous systems? Explain.
149. What are different types of sensors? What are the functional challenges to
overcome in designing the context-aware systems?
150. Explain the following:
Wireless sensor networks, In-network processing, Disruption-tolerant networking.
151. What is location sensing? Discuss different location sensing technologies.
152. Discuss security and privacy related issues and their solutions in volatile systems.
153. What are adaptive systems? Discuss the OS support for adaption to volatile
resources.
154. Explain HPs Cooltown project.