Distributed Systems

Overview
Distributed system is collection of loosely coupled processors
interconnected by a communications network
Processors variously called nodes, computers, machines, hosts
Site is location of the processor
Generally a server has a resource a client node at a different site
wants to use
 Reasons for Distributed Systems

Reasons for distributed systems

Resource sharing
 Sharing and printing files at remote sites
 Processing information in a distributed database
 Using remote specialized hardware devices
Computation speedup – load sharing or job migration
Reliability – detect and recover from site failure, function transfer,
reintegrate failed site
Communication – message passing
 All higher-level functions of a standalone system can be
expanded to encompass a distributed system
Computers can be downsized, more flexibility, better user
interfaces and easier maintenance by moving from large system to
multiple smaller systems performing distributed computing
Types of Distributed Operating Systems
Network Operating Systems

Distributed Operating Systems

 Network-Operating Systems
Users are aware of multiplicity of machines
Access to resources of various machines is done explicitly by:
Remote logging into the appropriate remote machine
(telnet, ssh)
Remote Desktop (Microsoft Windows)
Transferring data from remote machines to local machines,
via the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) mechanism
Users must change paradigms – establish a session, give
network-based commands
More difficult for users
 Distributed-Operating Systems

Users not aware of multiplicity of machines

Access to remote resources similar to access to local
resources
Data Migration – transfer data by transferring entire file, or
transferring only those portions of the file necessary for the
immediate task
Computation Migration – transfer the computation, rather than
the data, across the system
Via remote procedure calls (RPCs)
or via messaging system
 Distributed-Operating Systems (Cont.)
Process Migration – execute an entire process, or parts of it, at
different sites
Load balancing – distribute processes across network to even
the workload
Computation speedup – subprocesses can run concurrently on
different sites
Hardware preference – process execution may require
specialized processor
Software preference – required software may be available at
only a particular site
Data access – run process remotely, rather than transfer all data
locally
Consider the World Wide Web
 Network Structure
Local-Area Network (LAN) – designed to cover small geographical area
Multiple topologies like star or ring
Speeds from 1Mb per second (Appletalk, bluetooth) to 40 Gbps for
fastest Ethernet over twisted pair copper or optical fibre
Consists of multiple computers (mainframes through mobile
devices), peripherals (printers, storage arrays), routers (specialized
network communication processors) providing access to other
networks
Ethernet most common way to construct LANs
 Multiaccess bus-based
 Defined by standard IEEE 802.3
Wireless spectrum (WiFi) increasingly used for networking
 I.e. IEEE 802.11g standard implemented at 54 Mbps
Local-area Network
 Network Types (Cont.)
Wide-Area Network (WAN) – links geographically separated sites
Point-to-point connections over long-haul lines (often leased from a
phone company)
 Implemented via connection processors known as routers
Internet WAN enables hosts world wide to communicate
 Hosts differ in all dimensions but WAN allows communications
Speeds
 T1 link is 1.544 Megabits per second
 T3 is 28 x T1s = 45 Mbps
 OC-12 is 622 Mbps
WANs and LANs interconnect, similar to cell phone network:
 Cell phones use radio waves to cell towers
 Towers connect to other towers and hubs
Communication Processors in a Wide-Area Network
 Communication Structure

The design of a communication network must address four basic issues:

Naming and name resolution - How do two processes locate

each other to communicate?
Routing strategies - How are messages sent through the
network?
Connection strategies - How do two processes send a
sequence of messages?
Contention - The network is a shared resource, so how do we
resolve conflicting demands for its use?
 Naming and Name Resolution

Name systems in the network

Address messages with the process-id
Identify processes on remote systems by
<host-name, identifier> pair
Domain name system (DNS) – specifies the naming
structure of the hosts, as well as name to address
resolution (Internet)
 Routing Strategies
Fixed routing - A path from A to B is specified in advance; path
changes only if a hardware failure disables it
Since the shortest path is usually chosen, communication costs
are minimized
Fixed routing cannot adapt to load changes
Ensures that messages will be delivered in the order in which
they were sent
Virtual routing- A path from A to B is fixed for the duration of one
session. Different sessions involving messages from A to B may
have different paths
Partial remedy to adapting to load changes
Ensures that messages will be delivered in the order in which
they were sent
 Routing Strategies (Cont.)
Dynamic routing - The path used to send a message form site A to
site B is chosen only when a message is sent
Usually a site sends a message to another site on the link least
used at that particular time
Adapts to load changes by avoiding routing messages on
heavily used path
Messages may arrive out of order
 This problem can be remedied by appending a sequence
number to each message
Most complex to set up
Tradeoffs mean all methods are used
UNIX provides ability to mix fixed and dynamic
Hosts may have fixed routes and gateways connecting
networks together may have dynamic routes
 Routing Strategies (Cont.)
Router is communications processor responsible for routing
messages
Must have at least 2 network connections
Maybe special purpose or just function running on host
Checks its tables to determine where destination host is, where to
send messages
Static routing – table only changed manually
Dynamic routing – table changed via routing protocol
 Routing Strategies (Cont.)
More recently, routing managed by intelligent software more
intelligently than routing protocols
OpenFlow is device-independent, allowing developers to
introduce network efficiencies by decoupling data-routing
decisions from underlying network devices
Messages vary in length – simplified design breaks them into
packets (or frames, or datagrams)
Connectionless message is just one packet
Otherwise need a connection to get a multi-packet message
from source to destination
 Connection Strategies
Circuit switching - A permanent physical link is established for
the duration of the communication (i.e., telephone system)
Message switching - A temporary link is established for the
duration of one message transfer (i.e., post-office mailing system)
Packet switching - Messages of variable length are divided into
fixed-length packets which are sent to the destination
Each packet may take a different path through the network
The packets must be reassembled into messages as they arrive
Circuit switching requires setup time, but incurs less overhead for
shipping each message, and may waste network bandwidth
Message and packet switching require less setup time, but
incur more overhead per message
 Communication Protocol
The communication network is partitioned into the following multiple
layers:
Layer 1: Physical layer – handles the mechanical and electrical
details of the physical transmission of a bit stream
Layer 2: Data-link layer – handles the frames, or fixed-length
parts of packets, including any error detection and recovery
that occurred in the physical layer
Layer 3: Network layer – provides connections and routes
packets in the communication network, including handling the
address of outgoing packets, decoding the address of incoming
packets, and maintaining routing information for proper
response to changing load levels
 Communication Protocol (Cont.)
Layer 4: Transport layer – responsible for low-level network
access and for message transfer between clients, including
partitioning messages into packets, maintaining packet order,
controlling flow, and generating physical addresses
Layer 5: Session layer – implements sessions, or process-to-
process communications protocols
Layer 6: Presentation layer – resolves the differences in
formats among the various sites in the network, including
character conversions, and half duplex/full duplex (echoing)
Layer 7: Application layer – interacts directly with the users,
deals with file transfer, remote-login protocols and electronic
mail, as well as schemas for distributed databases
Communication Via ISO Network Model
The ISO Protocol Layer
The ISO Network Message
The TCP/IP Protocol Layers
 Example: TCP/IP
The transmission of a network packet between hosts on an
Ethernet network
Every host has a unique IP address and a corresponding Ethernet
Media Access Control (MAC) address
Communication requires both addresses
Domain Name Service (DNS) can be used to acquire IP addresses
Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is used to map MAC addresses to
IP addresses
Broadcast to all other systems on the Ethernet network
If the hosts are on the same network, ARP can be used
If the hosts are on different networks, the sending host will
send the packet to a router which routes the packet to the
destination network
An Ethernet Packet
 Robustness

Failure detection

Reconfiguration
 Failure Detection
Detecting hardware failure is difficult
To detect a link failure, a heartbeat protocol can be used
Assume Site A and Site B have established a link
At fixed intervals, each site will exchange an I-am-up
message indicating that they are up and running
If Site A does not receive a message within the fixed interval,
it assumes either (a) the other site is not up or (b) the
message was lost
Site A can now send an Are-you-up? message to Site B
If Site A does not receive a reply, it can repeat the message or
try an alternate route to Site B
 Failure Detection (Cont.)

If Site A does not ultimately receive a reply from Site B, it

concludes some type of failure has occurred
Types of failures:
- Site B is down
- The direct link between A and B is down
- The alternate link from A to B is down
- The message has been lost
However, Site A cannot determine exactly why the failure has
occurred
 Reconfiguration

When Site A determines a failure has occurred, it must

reconfigure the system:
1. If the link from A to B has failed, this must be broadcast
to every site in the system
2. If a site has failed, every other site must also be notified
indicating that the services offered by the failed site are
no longer available
When the link or the site becomes available again, this
information must again be broadcast to all other sites
 Design Issues

Transparency – the distributed system should appear as a

conventional, centralized system to the user
Fault tolerance – the distributed system should continue to
function in the face of failure
Scalability – as demands increase, the system should easily
accept the addition of new resources to accommodate the
increased demand
Consider Hadoop open source programming framework for
processing large datasets in distributed environments
(based on Google search indexing)
Clusters – a collection of semi-autonomous machines that acts
as a single system
 Distributed File System

Distributed file system (DFS) – a distributed

implementation of the classical time-sharing model of a file
system, where multiple users share files and storage
resources
A DFS manages set of dispersed storage devices
Overall storage space managed by a DFS is composed of
different, remotely located, smaller storage spaces
There is usually a correspondence between constituent
storage spaces and sets of files
Challenges include:
Naming and Transparency
Remote File Access
 DFS Structure

Service – software entity running on one or more machines

and providing a particular type of function to a priori
unknown clients
Server – service software running on a single machine
Client – process that can invoke a service using a set of
operations that forms its client interface
A client interface for a file service is formed by a set of
primitive file operations (create, delete, read, write)
Client interface of a DFS should be transparent, i.e., not
distinguish between local and remote files
Sometimes lower level intermachine interface need for cross-
machine interaction
 Naming and Transparency

Naming – mapping between logical and physical objects

Multilevel mapping – abstraction of a file that hides the
details of how and where on the disk the file is actually stored
A transparent DFS hides the location where in the network
the file is stored
For a file being replicated in several sites, the mapping
returns a set of the locations of this file’s replicas; both the
existence of multiple copies and their location are hidden
 Naming Structures

Location transparency – file name does not reveal the

file’s physical storage location
Location independence – file name does not need to be
changed when the file’s physical storage location changes
 Naming Schemes — Three Main Approaches

Files named by combination of their host name and local name;

guarantees a unique system-wide name
Attach remote directories to local directories, giving the appearance
of a coherent directory tree; only previously mounted remote
directories can be accessed transparently
Total integration of the component file systems
A single global name structure spans all the files in the system
If a server is unavailable, some arbitrary set of directories on
different machines also becomes unavailable
In practice most DFSs use static, location-transparent mapping for
user-level names
Some support file migration
Hadoop supports file migration but without following POSIX
standards
 Remote File Access

Remote-service mechanism is one transfer approach

Reduce network traffic by retaining recently accessed disk blocks
in a cache, so that repeated accesses to the same information can be
handled locally
If needed data not already cached, a copy of data is brought
from the server to the user
Accesses are performed on the cached copy
Files identified with one master copy residing at the server
machine, but copies of (parts of) the file are scattered in
different caches
Cache-consistency problem – keeping the cached copies
consistent with the master file
 Could be called network virtual memory
 Cache Location – Disk vs. Main Memory

Advantages of disk caches

More reliable
Cached data kept on disk are still there during recovery
and don’t need to be fetched again
Advantages of main-memory caches:
Permit workstations to be diskless
Data can be accessed more quickly
Performance speedup in bigger memories
Server caches (used to speed up disk I/O) are in main
memory regardless of where user caches are located; using
main-memory caches on the user machine permits a single
caching mechanism for servers and users
 Cache Update Policy
Write-through – write data through to disk as soon as they are
placed on any cache
Reliable, but poor performance
Delayed-write (write-back) – modifications written to the cache
and then written through to the server later
Write accesses complete quickly; some data may be overwritten before
they are written back, and so need never be written at all
Poor reliability; unwritten data will be lost whenever a user machine
crashes
Variation – scan cache at regular intervals and flush blocks that have
been modified since the last scan
Variation – write-on-close, writes data back to the server when the file
is closed
 Best for files that are open for long periods and frequently modified
 Consistency

Is locally cached copy of the data consistent with the master

copy?
Client-initiated approach
Client initiates a validity check
Server checks whether the local data are consistent with the
master copy
Server-initiated approach
Server records, for each client, the (parts of) files it caches
When server detects a potential inconsistency, it must react