JAWAHARLAL NEHRU TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY HYDERABAD MCA DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS Previous Question Paper (January - 2018 - R15)

Interprocess communication (IPC) is a set of mechanisms that allows processes to manage shared data and synchronize their actions in a distributed system. It enables processes to exchange information and coordinate activities even when they reside on different nodes. Common IPC models include message passing, where processes communicate by sending and receiving messages, and remote procedure calls (RPC), which allow a process to execute a procedure in another address space as if it were a local call.

A thread is the smallest unit of execution within a process, sharing the process's resources such as memory and file handles while maintaining its own program counter and stack. The key differences are:

• Resource Ownership: A process is an independent execution unit with its own address space, whereas threads share the address space of their parent process.
• Creation/Context Switching: Creating and switching between threads is significantly faster and requires less overhead than creating or switching between processes.
• Communication: Threads communicate directly via shared memory, while processes require formal IPC mechanisms.