KABARAK UNIVERSITY

UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS
MAIN CAMPUS
SECOND SEMESTER 2020/2021 ACADEMIC YEAR
EXAMINATION FOR THE DEGREES OF BACHELOR OF SCINCE IN
COMPUTER SCIENCE, BACHELOR OF SCINCE IN INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY, BACHELOR OF SCINCE IN COMPUTER SECURITY
AND FORENSICS, BACHELOR OF BUSINESS INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY, BACHELOR OF BUSINESS INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY, BACHELOR OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT AND
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

COMP 322/INTE 321/COSF 326: DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

STREAM: Y3/S2 - REGULAR TIME: 2:00-4:00PM

EXAMINATION SESSION: MAY-AUGUST DATE: 20/08/2021

INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES
1. Answer Question 1 and any other two questions in the answer booklet provided.
2. Do not write on your question papers. All rough work should be done in your
answer booklet.
3. Clearly indicate which question you are answering.
4. Write neatly and legibly.
5. Edit your work for language and grammar errors.
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 6. Follow all the instructions in the answer booklet

SECTION A: (Compulsory) TOTAL MARKS FOR THIS SECTION IS 30.

1.
b) Explain the role of middleware in a distributed system [2 Marks]
c)
i) Explain what is meant by distribution transparency and give examples of different
types of transparency. [5 Marks]
ii) Why it is not always a good idea to aim at implementing the highest degree of
transparency possible? [2 Marks]
d) Why it is sometimes so hard to hide the occurrence and recovery from failures in a
distributed system? [3 Marks]
e) What is an open distributed system and what benefits does openness provide? [2 Marks]
f) Giving example explain the difference between a vertical distribution and a horizontal
distribution? [4 Marks]
g) In a structured overlay network, messages are routed according to the topology of the
overlay. What is an important disadvantage of this approach? [4 Marks]
h) If a client and a server are placed far apart, we may see network latency dominating
overall performance. Describe TWO approaches to explain how this problem can be
tackled? [4 Marks]
i) An experimental file server is up 3/4 of the time and down 1/4 of the time, due to bugs.
How many times does this file server have to be replicated to give an availability of at
least 99%? [4 Marks]

SECTION B. TOTAL MARKS FOR THIS SECTION IS 40.

ANSWER ANY TWO QUESTIONS FROM THIS SECTION. EACH QUESTION IN

THIS SECTION CARRIES 20 MARKS.

2.

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Jesus as Lord. (1 Peter 3:15)

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 a) Explain why middleware based distributed systems are built above network operating
systems, not distributed operating systems. [3 Marks]

b) Outline FIVE differences between network operating systems, distributed operating

systems and middleware based distributed systems [5 Marks]
c) Not every node in a peer-to-peer network should become super-peer. What are the TWO
reasonable requirements that a super-peer should meet? [2 Marks]
d) Early distributed computing approaches assumed that the middleware has to provide
complete distribution transparency. Currently this opinion is changing. Explain why.
[2 Marks]
e) Assume you have been asked to design and implement a distributed system for video
processing, which requires high Quality-of-Service. Would you use TCP or UDP for your
middleware implementation? Justify your answer. [4 Marks]
f) Socket Programming and Message-Queuing (MQ) systems provide mechanisms to
communicate with remote entities. Describe any two advantages of MQ systems when
compared to Socket Programming. Explain one disadvantage of MQ systems with respect
to Socket Programming? [4 Marks]
3.
a) Describe precisely what is meant by a scalable system and explain the techniques that can
be used to achieve scalability? [3 Marks]
b) Explain why transport-level communication services are often inappropriate for building
distributed applications? [3 Marks]
c) Describe the differences between Internet stream sockets and datagram sockets
[4 Marks]
d) List the five basic distributed services in OSF DCE. [ 3 Marks]
e) What is the difference between a multiprocessor and a multicomputer [3 Marks]
f) A multicomputer with 256 CPUs is organized as a 16 by16 grid. What is the worst-case
delay (in hops) that a message might have to take? [4 Marks]

As members of Kabarak University family, we purpose at all times and in all places, to set apart in one’s heart,
Jesus as Lord. (1 Peter 3:15)

Kabarak University is ISO 9001:2015 Certified

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4.
a) Describe how one can debug RPC-based client-server applications. [2 Marks]
b) Given a syntactically-correct IDL definition, RPC compiler generates three files. List and
describe these files in general terms. [6 Marks]
c) A process in a distributed system runs on one node and accesses data from another node.
After some time, for load balancing purposes, this process relocates to a different node.
What kind of transparencies should be provided for this process in a distributed system?
[5 Marks]
d) Explain why marshaling and unmarshaling are important in exchanging data between
communicating entities in a distributed system? [3 Marks]
e) What is the method that is usually used to enable any two computers to exchange binary
data values? Listat least one approach that is widely used to achieve that. [3 Points]
5.

a) Is a distributed algorithm more fault tolerant than a centralized algorithm? Provide an example to
support your answer. [4 Marks]
b) Provide two examples of applications that require persistent and asynchronous communication.
Explain your answer. [4 Marks]
c) What are the main differences between Remote Procedure Calls and Remote Method
Invocations? [4 Marks]
d)
i) We want to compare the performance of a single threaded and a multi-threaded file server.
The following assumptions are made. It takes 10ms to get a request, dispatch it and do the
rest of the necessary processing involved in serving the file, assuming the file is cached in
main memory. If the file is not cached, a disk operation is needed in which case an additional
50ms is required, during which the thread sleeps. We assume that for one third of all requests,

As members of Kabarak University family, we purpose at all times and in all places, to set apart in one’s heart,
Jesus as Lord. (1 Peter 3:15)

Kabarak University is ISO 9001:2015 Certified

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 the file can be served from the cache. How many requests per second can the single-threaded
server handle? [5 Marks]

ii) How many requests per second can the multi-threaded server handle? Assume that there is
always enough threads. [3 Marks]

As members of Kabarak University family, we purpose at all times and in all places, to set apart in one’s heart,
Jesus as Lord. (1 Peter 3:15)

Kabarak University is ISO 9001:2015 Certified

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