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Distributed Systems And Applications - Bmit 424 Question Paper
Distributed Systems And Applications - Bmit 424
Course:Bachelor Of Business Management And Information Technology
Institution: Kabarak University question papers
Exam Year:2009
COURSE TITLE: DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS AND APPLICATIONS
INSTRUCTIONS:
ATTEMPT QUESTIONS ONE IN SECTION A AND THREE QUESTIONS FROM SECTION B
SECTION A: (40 MARKS)
QUESTION 1 (COMPULSORY)
1. A particular bank has branches in major towns of the Kenya i.e. Nairobi, Nakuru, Eldoret, Kisumu,
Kakamega and Mombasa. Each branch uses a computer for the management of its information, but
the branches are not currently linked together. The bank wants to interate the branches (nodes) using
a computer network and it has two options – to design either;
• Option 1: A centralized system – all nodes linked to a central node by a computer network
OR
• Option 2: A distributed system.
You are required to advice the company’s IT director (who is not conversant with distributed
systems) about the following;
a) Explain to director two benefits that the users will be expected to observe when the
company implements Options 2 as compared to Option 1. (4 Marks)
b) Describe to him a reason as to why the following are more difficult to implement for
Option 2 as compared to Option 1.
(i) Naming scheme
(ii) Consistency maintenance (4 Marks)
c) Describe to him two reasons as to why they should implement each of the
following techniques in the system.
(i) Replication
(ii) Caching (6 Marks)
d) You should also advice on how their customer database should be stored. Two
methods of doing this are;
(i) Storing the whole customer database in each branch.
(ii) Splitting the customer database into portions record Wise i.e. records
of customers who reside near a branch are stored as a database portion
in that branch.
Required
i. Give any four objectives that one should have in mind when deciding on which method to
use to store the database. (4 Marks)
ii. Explain one advantage and one disadvantage of one of the above two methods over the
other based on the above four objectives. (4 Marks)
e) Explain the roles performed by ORB in a CORBA system. (8 Marks)
f) Explain the meaning of each of the following terms as used in distributed systems
– fault tolerance, openness, reliability, scalability and transparency. (10 Marks)
SECTION B: (60 MARKS)
ATTEMPT ANY THREE QUESTIONS
2. a) How do the clock synchronization issues differ in a centralized and distributed computing
system? (4 Marks)
b) In what aspects is the design of a distributed file system differ from that of a file system
for a centralized file sharing system? (4 Marks)
c) Distinguish between a stateful and stateless server and explain the relative advantages of
using a stateless server in a distributed system. (4 Marks)
d) Explain the major steps of a Remote Procedure Call in a distributed system. (3 Marks)
e) Discuss the Lamport event ordering concept in a distributed system. (5 Marks)
3. a) Explain the distributed approach for generating system oriented names and the main
drawbacks it suffers. (5 Marks)
b) Describe briefly three types of transparencies in distributed systems. (5 Marks)
c) Why do you think transparency is important to user/programmer of a distributed system?
Describe two advantages. (6 Marks)
d) Describe an example of a distributed system you know. Show how it satisfies the main
requirements of a well designed distributed system. (4 Marks)
4. a) For each of the following applications discuss advantages and disadvantages of the
protocols UDP and TCP. (4 Marks)
Suggest which protocols are best suited for;
(i) Voice IP (4 Marks)
(ii) Resolution of domain names in internet address. (4 Marks)
(iii) Remote method invocation (4 Marks)
b) Describe the mutual exclusion algorithm in distributed systems. (4 Marks)
5. a) Describe each of the ACID properties for a transaction. Now consider two user programs
simultaneneously and atomically appending to a file in the Google file system. How does
GFS guarantee each of the four ACID properties? (10 Marks)
b) Explain the main differences between the Google file system and the NFS (5 Marks)
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