Unit 3:

1. What is clock synchronization?

Nodes in distributed system to keep track of current time for various purposes such
as calculating the time spent by a process in CPU utilization ,disk I/O etc so that
the corresponding user can be charged. Clock synchronization means the time
difference between two nodes should be very small.
2. Explain the term mutual exclusion
A program object that blocks multiple users from accessing the same shared
variable or data at the same time. With a critical section, a region of code in which
multiple processes or threads access the same shared resource, this idea is put to
use in concurrent programming.
3. What is deadlock?
A Deadlock is a situation where a set of processes are blocked because each
process is holding a resource and waiting for another resource occupied by some
other process. When this situation arises, it is known as Deadlock. Deadlock.
4.Name the two types of messages used in Ricart-Agrawala's algorithm
The algorithm uses two types of messages: REQUEST and REPLY. A process
sends a REQUEST message to all other processes to request their permission to
enter the critical section. A process sends a REPLY message to a process to give
its permission to that process.
5.What are the conditions for deadlock?
The four necessary conditions for a deadlock situation are mutual exclusion, no
preemption, hold and wait, and circular set. There are four methods of handling
deadlocks - deadlock avoidance, deadlock prevention, deadline detection and
recovery, and deadlock ignorance.
6.Which are the three basic approaches for implementing distributed mutual
exclusion?
 Token-based approach.
 Non-token-based approach.
 Quorum-based approach.
7.What are the requirements of mutual exclusion algorithms?
 No Deadlock: Two or more site should not endlessly wait for any message that
will never arrive.
 No Starvation: Every site who wants to execute critical section should get an
opportunity to execute it in finite time.
8.What is response time?
Response time includes the time taken to transmit the inquiry, process it by the
computer, and transmit the response back to the terminal.
9.What is wait for graph?
A wait-for graph in computer science is a directed graph used for deadlock
detection in operating systems and relational database systems.
10.What do you mean by deadlock avoidance?
Deadlock avoidance is another technique used in operating systems to deal with
deadlocks. Unlike deadlock prevention, which aims to eliminate the possibility of
deadlocks, deadlock avoidance focuses on dynamically detecting and avoiding
situations that could lead to deadlocks.
11.Define deadlock detection in distributed system?
Deadlock detection involves two basic tasks: maintenance of the state graph and
search of the state graph for the presence of cycles. Because in distributed systems
a cycle may involve several sites, the search for cycles greatly depends on how the
system state graph is represented across

Part B:
1. Analyze suzuki kasami's broadcast algorithm for mutual exclusion in
distributed system
2. Discuss with suitable example to show that a deadlock cannot occur if any
one of the four conditions is absent
3. Name and explain the different types of deadlock models in distributed
system with the commonly used strategies to handle deadlocks with a neat
diagram.
Unit 4:
1. What do you mean by clock skew and clock drift?
 Clock skew – Instantaneous difference between the readings of any two clocks is
called clock skew. Skew occurs since computer clocks like any others tends not be
perfect at all times.

Clock drift – Clock drift occurs in crystal based clocks which counts time at
different rates and hence they diverge. The drift rate is the change in the offset
between the clock and a nominal perfect reference clock per unit of time measured
by the reference clock.
2. What do you mean by Coordinated Universal Time?
Coordinated Universal Time generally abbreviated as UTC is an international
standard for timekeeping. It is based on atomic time. UTC signals are synchronized
and broadcast regularly from land based radio stations and satellites covering many
parts of the world.
3. Define External Synchronization.
Generally it is necessary to synchronize the processes’ clocks Ci with an
authoritative external source of time. It is called as External Synchronization. For a
synchronization bound D>0, and for a source S of UTC time, | S(t) – Ci(t)|<D for
i=1,2..N for all real times t in I where I is the time interval.
4. When an object is considered to be garbage?
An object is considered to be garbage if there are no longer any references to it
anywhere in the distributed system. The memory taken up by the object can be
reclaimed once it is known to be garbage. The technique used here is distributed
garbage collection.
5. What do you meant by Distributed debugging?
In general, distributed systems are complex to debug.A special care needs to be
taken in establishing what occurred during the execution. Consider an application
with a variable xi(i=1,2..N) and the variable changes as the program executes but it
is always required to be within a value $ of one other. In that case, relationship
must be evaluated for values of the variables that occur at the same time.
6. Define marker receiving rule.
Snapshot algorithm designed by Chandy and Lamport is used for determining
global states of distributed systems. This algorithm is defined through two rules
namely marker sending rule and marker receiving rule. Marker receiving rule
obligates a process that has not recorded its state to do so.
7. Define marker sending rule.
Snapshot algorithm designed by Chandy and Lamport is used for determining
global states of distributed systems. This algorithm is defined through 2 rules
namely marker sending rule and marker receiving rule. Marker sending rule
obligates processes to send a marker after they have recorded their state ,but before
they send any other messages.
8. Define the characteristics of serial equivalent transactions.
For any pair of transactions, it is possible to determine the order of pairs of
conflicting operations on objects accessed by both of them. Read and write are the
operations generally considered. For two transactions to be serially equivalent it is
necessary and sufficient that all pairs of conflicting operations of the two
transactions be executed in the same order at all of the objects they both access.
9. What are the advantages of nested transactions?
The outermost transaction in a set of nested transactions is called top level
transaction. Transactions other than the top level transaction are called
subtransactions.
Advantages of nested transactions are:
 Subtransactions at one level may run concurrently with other subtransactions at
the same level in the hierarchy. This can allow additional concurrency in a
transaction.
 Subtransactions can commit or abort independently.

10. What are the rules of committing nested transactions?

Rules for committing of nested transactions are:
 A transaction may commit or abort only after its child transactions have
completed.
 When a subtransaction completes, it makes an independent decision
either to commit provisionally or to abort.
 When a parent aborts, all of its transactions are aborted.

When a subtransaction aborts, the parent can decide whether to abort or not
11. Write short notes on strict two phase locking
A simple mechanism of a serializing mechanism is the use of exclusive locks.
Under a strict execution regime, a transaction that needs to read or write an object
must be delayed until other transactions that wrote the same object have committed
or aborted. To enforce this rule, any locks applied during the progress of a
transaction are held until the transaction commits or aborts. This is called strict
two-phase locking. The presence of the locks prevents other transactions reading or
writing the objects.
12. Define the approach of two phase commit protocol.
Two phase commit protocol is designed to allow any participant to abort its part
of a transaction. In the first phase of the protocol, each participant votes for the
transaction to be committed or aborted. In the second phase of the protocol,
every participant in the transaction carries out the joint decision

16 marks :

1.List the agreement statement that should be followed in synchronous system with
failure?
2.Illustrate briefly the two kinds of checkpoints for checkpoint algorithm?
3.Discuss the issues of failure recovery with an example?
4.Illustrate the different types of failure in distributed systems
Unit 5:
1.What is cloud service
Cloud services are infrastructure, platforms, or software that are hosted by third-
party providers and made available to users through the internet.
Cloud services facilitate the flow of user data from front-end clients (e.g., users’
servers, tablets, desktops, laptops—anything on the users’ ends), through the
internet, to the provider’s systems, and back.
2.What is public cloud
The public cloud is defined as computing services offered by third-party providers
over the public Internet, making them available to anyone who wants to use or
purchase them. They may be free or sold on-demand, allowing customers to pay
only per usage for the CPU cycles, storage, or bandwidth they consume.
3.What is private cloud
A private cloud is a cloud computing environment dedicated to a single
organization. Any cloud infrastructure has underlying compute resources like CPU
and storage that you provision on demand through a self-service portal. In a private
cloud, all resources are isolated and in the control of one organization.
4.What is Virtual Machine
A virtual machine (VM) is a digital version of a physical computer. Virtual
machine software can run programs and operating systems, store data, connect to
networks, and do other computing functions, and requires maintenance such as
updates and system monitoring.
5. Characteristics of Cloud Computing
1. On-demand self-services: The Cloud computing services does not require any
human administrators, user themselves are able to provision, monitor and manage
computing resources as needed.
2. Broad network access: The Computing services are generally provided over
standard networks and heterogeneous devices.
3. Rapid elasticity: The Computing services should have IT resources that are able
to scale out and in quickly and on as needed basis. Whenever the user require
services it is provided to him and it is scale out as soon as its requirement gets
over.

6. Cloud infrastructure components

1. Computing
2. Networking
3. Storage
7.What is Hypervisor
Hypervisor :
Hypervisor is a firmware or a low level program which is a key to enable
virtualization. It is used to divide and allocate cloud resources between several
customers. As it monitors and manages cloud services/resources that’s why
hypervisor is called as VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) or (Virtual Machine
Manager).
8. Characteristics of IAAS
 Resources-as-a-service. ...

 Pay-as-you-go pricing model. ...

 Scalable services. ...

 Automated administrative tasks. ...

 Platform virtualization.

9.What is IAAS?
IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service, is a cloud computing model that provides on-
demand access to computing resources such as servers, storage, networking, and
virtualization.
IaaS is attractive because acquiring computing resources to run applications or
store data the traditional way requires time and capital. Organizations must
purchase equipment through procurement processes that can take months. They
must invest in physical spaces, typically specialized rooms with power and
cooling. And after deploying the systems, they need IT professionals to manage
and maintain them.

Part B :

1.Explain about Cloud Services

2.Difference between Iaas, Paas, Saas
3.Explain about cloud models
4.Difference between cloud computing and Virtualization