DistributedSystems

Question 1

What is a distributed system?

Answer 1

A collection of independent computers that appears to users as a single coherent system.

Question 2

List benefits of distributed systems.

Answer 2

Resource sharing, computation speedup, reliability, communication between users.

Question 3

What are the main challenges in distributed systems?

Answer 3

Coordination, fault tolerance, security, consistency.

Question 4

What is a process in a distributed system?

Answer 4

A running program that may communicate with processes on other machines.

Question 5

How do processes communicate in distributed systems?

Answer 5

Using message passing through sockets.

Question 6

What is a socket?

Answer 6

An endpoint for communication between two machines.

Question 7

What are the two types of socket programming?

Answer 7

UDP (connectionless) and TCP (connection-oriented).

Question 8

Describe the basic steps in a UDP client-server communication.

Answer 8

Client sends datagram to server, server processes it and sends a response.

Question 9

Describe the basic steps in a TCP client-server communication.

Answer 9

Client connects to server, establishes a TCP connection, exchanges messages.

Question 10

What is Remote Procedure Call (RPC)?

Answer 10

A mechanism for invoking a procedure on a remote machine as if it were local.