Focus on resource sharing




 

Users are so accustomed to the benefits of resource sharing that they may easily overlook their significance. We routinely share hardware resources such as printers, data resources such as files, and resources with more specific functionality such as search engines. Looked at from the point of view of hardware provision, we share equipment such as printers and disks to reduce costs. But of far greater significance to users is the sharing of the higher-level resources that play a part in their applications and in their everyday work and social activities. For example, users are concerned with sharing data in the form of a shared database or a set of web pages – not the disks and processors on which they are implemented. Similarly, users think in terms of shared resources such as a search engine or a currency converter, without regard for the server or servers that provide these.

In practice, patterns of resource sharing vary widely in their scope and in how closely users work together. At one extreme, a search engine on the Web provides a facility to users throughout the world, users who need never come into contact with one another directly. At the other extreme, in computer-supported cooperative working (CSCW), a group of users who cooperate directly share resources such as documents in a small, closed group. The pattern of sharing and the geographic distribution of particular users determines what mechanisms the system must supply to coordinate users’ actions. We use the term service for a distinct part of a computer system that manages a collection of related resources and presents their functionality to users and applications.
For example, we access shared files through a file service; we send documents to printers through a printing service; we buy goods through an electronic payment service.
The only access we have to the service is via the set of operations that it exports. For example, a file service provides read, write and delete operations on files.
The fact that services restrict resource access to a well-defined set of operations is in part standard software engineering practice. But it also reflects the physical organization of distributed systems. Resources in a distributed system are physically encapsulated within computers and can only be accessed from other computers by
means of communication. For effective sharing, each resource must be managed by a program that offers a communication interface enabling the resource to be accessed and updated reliably and consistently.
The term server is probably familiar to most readers. It refers to a running program (a process) on a networked computer that accepts requests from programs running on other computers to perform a service and responds appropriately. The requesting processes are referred to as clients, and the overall approach is known as client-server computing. In this approach, requests are sent in messages from clients to a server and replies are sent in messages from the server to the clients. When the client sends a request for an operation to be carried out, we say that the client invokes an operation upon the server. A complete interaction between a client and a server, from the point when the client sends its request to when it receives the server’s response, is called a remote invocation.
The same process may be both a client and a server since servers sometimes invoke operations on other servers. The terms ‘client’ and ‘server’ apply only to the roles played in a single request. Clients are active (making requests) and servers are passive (only waking up when they receive requests); servers run continuously, whereas clients last only as long as the applications of which they form a part.
Note that while by default the terms ‘client’ and ‘server’ refers to processes rather than the computers that they execute upon, in everyday parlance those terms also refer to the computers themselves. Another distinction is that in a distributed system written in an object-oriented language, resources may be encapsulated as objects and accessed by client objects, in which case we speak of a client object invoking a method upon a server object.
Many, but certainly not all, distributed systems can be constructed entirely in the form of interacting clients and servers. The World Wide Web, email and networked printers all fit this model.
An executing web browser is an example of a client. The web browser
communicates with a web server, to request web pages from it.

 



Frequently Asked Questions

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Ans: hysical resources such as storage and processing can be made available to networked computers, removing the need to own such resources on their own. At one end of the spectrum, a user may opt for a remote storage facility for file storage requirements view more..
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Ans: The crucial characteristic of continuous media types is that they include a temporal dimension, and indeed, the integrity of the media type is fundamentally dependent on preserving real-time relationships between elements of a media type. view more..
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Ans: Technological advances in device miniaturization and wireless networking have led increasingly to the integration of small and portable computing devices into distributed systems. view more..
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Ans: In practice, patterns of resource sharing vary widely in their scope and in how closely users work together. At one extreme, a search engine on the Web provides a facility to users throughout the world, users who need never come into contact with one another directly. At the other extreme, in computer-supported cooperative working (CSCW), a group of users who cooperate directly share resources such as documents in a small, closed group. view more..
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Ans: Data types such as integers may be represented in different ways on different sorts of hardware – for example, there are two alternatives for the byte ordering of integers. These differences in representation must be dealt with if messages are to be exchanged between programs running on different hardware view more..
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Ans: the publication of interfaces is only the starting point for adding and extending services in a distributed system. The challenge to designers is to tackle the complexity of distributed systems consisting of many components engineered by different people. view more..
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Ans: a firewall can be used to form a barrier around an intranet, restricting the traffic that can enter and leave, this does not deal with ensuring the appropriate use of resources by users within an intranet, or with the appropriate use of resources in the Internet, that are not protected by firewalls. view more..
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Ans: ly 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 number of computers and servers in the Internet has increased dramatically. view more..
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Ans: Failures in a distributed system are partial – that is, some components fail while others continue to function. Therefore the handling of failures is particularly difficult. The following techniques for dealing with failures are discussed throughout the book view more..
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Ans: he process that manages a shared resource could take one client request at a time. But that approach limits throughput. Therefore services and applications generally allow multiple client requests to be processed concurrently. view more..
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Ans: oncealment 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 view more..
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Ans: Reliability and security issues are critical in the design of most computer systems. The performance aspect of quality of service was originally defined in terms of responsiveness and computational throughput, but it has been redefined in terms of ability to meet timeliness guarantees, as discussed in the following paragraphs view more..
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Ans: The Web began life at the European centre for nuclear research (CERN), Switzerland, in 1989 as a vehicle for exchanging documents between a community of physicists connected by the Internet [Berners-Lee 1999]. A key feature of the Web is that it provides a hypertext structure among the documents that it stores, reflecting the users’ requirement to organize their knowledge. view more..
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Ans: Resource sharing is the main motivating factor for constructing distributed systems. Resources such as printers, files, web pages or database records are managed by servers of the appropriate type. For example, web servers manage web pages and other web resources. Resources are accessed by clients – for example, the clients of web servers are generally called browsers. view more..
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Ans: Physical models consider the types of computers and devices that constitute a system and their interconnectivity, without details of specific technologies. view more..
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Ans: The discussion and examples of Chapter 1 suggest that distributed systems of different types share important underlying properties and give rise to common design problems. In this chapter we show how the properties and design issues of distributed systems can be captured and discussed through the use of descriptive models view more..
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Ans: A physical model is a representation of the underlying hardware elements of a distributed system that abstracts away from specific details of the computer and networking technologies employed. view more..
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Ans: Major concerns are to make the system reliable, manageable, adaptable and cost-effective. The architectural design of a building has similar aspects – it determines not only its appearance but also its general structure and architectural style (gothic, neo-classical, modern) and provides a consistent frame of reference for the design view more..



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