CS4513 Exam Two Topic Outline

Here is an outline of the topics that might be on the second exam:

• Communication (Chapter 2.1 to 2.3)
  • Motivation for RPC
  • Steps in invoking an RPC
  • Issues in marshalling
  • Issues in call-by-reference
  • Issues in naming and locating RPC services
  • "Breadth-of-life" (for detecting down server)
  • Definition of Idempotent operation
  • Transport protocols and RPC
• Distributed File Systems (Chapter 10.1 to 10.2)
  • Typical file characteristics
  • Typical approaches towards sharing files
    • File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
    • Network File System (NFS)
    • Andrew File System (AFS)
  • Naming issues and relation to access and location transparency
  • Migration issues
  • Sharing semantics
  • Caching use
  • Scalability
  • Stateful vs. stateless
• Distributed Objects (Chapter 9 (high level))
  • Data transport
  • Data format
  • Location
    • Discovery
    • Registering and Finding a service
  • Misc: Leasing, Transactions
• Clusters
  • Determining idle workstations
  • Deciding when to tranfer load
  • Modeling with queueing theory
• Queuing Theory
  • Elements
    • interarrival times (lambda)
    • queue
    • sever
    • service times (mu)
  • Types:
    • M/M/1 (throughput T = 1/(mu-lambda)
    • M/M/n (throughput T = (1/n)1/(mu-lambda)
    • n M/M/1 queues (throughput complex!)
  • Limitations of queueing theory for modeling

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