JAWAHARLAL NEHRU TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY HYDERABAD MCA 2019 DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS Previous Question Paper (April/May - 2019 - R15)

The design requirements for distributed architectures focus on ensuring the system operates reliably and efficiently across multiple nodes. Key requirements include:

• Transparency: Hiding the distributed nature of the system from users and applications (e.g., access, location, and migration transparency).
• Scalability: The ability to handle increased workloads by adding resources without significant performance degradation.
• Reliability and Availability: Ensuring the system remains operational and data remains consistent even if individual components fail.
• Performance: Minimizing latency and maximizing throughput despite network communication overhead.
• Flexibility and Openness: Designing systems that can be easily extended or integrated with other systems using standard interfaces.

Thread synchronization is necessary in distributed systems to manage concurrent access to shared resources, such as memory, files, or network buffers. Without synchronization, multiple threads may attempt to modify the same data simultaneously, leading to race conditions and data corruption. Synchronization mechanisms, such as mutexes, semaphores, and monitors, ensure mutual exclusion, meaning only one thread can access a critical section at a time. This maintains data integrity, prevents deadlocks, and ensures that the system state remains consistent across concurrent operations.