Exams in Distributed Systems, Winter 2006/2006

Note: more information will be added later.

Dates and place

The exams will take place on 23rd – 25th January 2006 . If you have had all mandatory assignments approved in this semester, you are automatically signed up for the exams in this semester. If you have had all mandatory assignments approved in a previous semester, you must explicitly sign up for the exam.

Procedure

You draw a question at random and immediately start presenting it. The presentation should take 10-15 minutes, and is followed by approximately 5-10 minutes of questioning from the examiners. This may include questions in topics not covered by the question you have drawn. Finally there are 5 minutes for evaluation.

Questions

The exam questions consist of relatively broad topics. You must at the examination explain essential aspects of the topic. The subtopics listed for each question are only suggestions and are not a complete overview of the topic. You will be evaluated on the basis of your ability to demonstrate knowledge about and mastering of the topic.

Preparation time

No time is offered for preparation.

Language

The examination is performed in English or Danish at your choice. During a Danish examination, you are welcome to use the English technical terms.

Exam aids

You are not allowed to bring notes on paper. For each question you may bring at most three slides with figures, keywords and short notes. No credit is given for saying what is on the slides, so it is recommended that they only include a disposition and possibly figures. The exam questions including the subtopics will be available for you on paper in the examination room.

Curriculum (pensum)

The following is an overview of the curriculum (pensum) for the exam.

Questions

The following is the list of exam questions.

  1. Question: Interprocess Communication
    • Identifying processes on the internet
    • Connectionless and connection oriented communication: UDP and TCP
    • Synchronous and asynchronous communication: blocking and non-blocking calls
    • External data representation
    • (Un)marshalling and (de)serialization
    • System failures and failure detectors
    • Request-reply protocols
  2. Question: RMI Design
    • RMI motivation and design goals
    • Remote interfaces
    • Local and remote objects
    • RMI components
    • RMI in action
    • Remote object references and binder services
    • Event based systems
  3. Question: .NET Remoting
    • The four steps of .NET Remoting
    • Registering types with the Remoting layer
    • Object Activation
    • Remote objects in .NET Remoting
    • .NET Remoting transparency
    • Lifetime management
  4. Question: Threads
    • Concurrency motivation
    • Processes and threads
    • Using threads in C#
    • Locks, synchronisation and monitors
    • ThreadPool
  5. Question: Time
    • Internal and external synchronization
    • Cristians algorithm
    • The Berkeley algorithm
    • Lamport time
    • Vector time and the happened-before relation
    • The synchronous and asynchronous models of interaction (section 2.3.1).
  6. Question: Distributed file systems
    • Comparison between the NFS api and the traditional UNIX api for file systems
    • Caching in NFS
    • AFS
    • One copy semantics.
  7. Question: Multicast
    • Unreliable, basic, reliable and uniform multicast
    • IP multicast.
    • Ordered multicast
  8. Question: Name services
    • Names and name services
    • Name resolution and navigation
    • Iterative, server-controlled, recursive navigation
    • DNS
    • Directory and discovery services
  9. Question: Replication
    • The model with frontends and replication managers
    • Goals of replication
    • Sequential consistency
    • Active replication
    • Passive replication
    • Use of view synchronous groups in replication
  10. Question: Transactions
    • ACID
    • Serial equivalence
    • Two-phase locking
    • Aborts and strict execution
    • Deadlocks
    • Granularity of locks and hierarchical locks
    • Nested transactions
    • Optimistic concurrency control, backward and forward validation

Questions hour

There will be a questions hour (spørgetime) Monday 9th January, 2006 at 13:15 in room 3A14. Questions should be sent in advance to kfl@itu.dk or to the newsgroup if you want a prepared answer.

Exam schedule

The exam schedule is given in the following. Please note that it is still tentative, and subject to change!

If you decide to stay away, please email me immediately to avoid having us wait in vain for you.

Students assigned the morning slot must show up at 09:00, and will be examinated before noon. Students assigned an afternoon slot must show up at 13:00 and will be examinated before 16:00. The order of students within a morning or afternoon slot given below is not related to the order of examination. If you do not show up on time, you risk not being examinated.

If you are not on the list, and think you should be, contact "Eksamenskontoret" and check that you have been registered for the exam.

TimeStudent
2006-01-23
Morning (09:00) Rasmus Johansen
Rune Skovgaard Larsen
Cenap Inci
Svend Erik Høst
Mikkel Fischer Christensen
Efstratios Kalogirou
Afternoon (13:00) Kristian Kjeldgaard Hoppe
Martin Vyuga
Robert Harrison Acquah
Ulrich Haslund
2006-01-24
Morning (09:00) Morten Milbak Mortensen
Andreas Djurhuus Korsgaard
Stephan Spangenberg
Ulf Holm Nielsen
Veronika Capskaja
Anton Michael Messing
Afternoon (13:00) Bent Aksel Moltved
Roderick James Ramsay
Martin Jagrin
Martin Larsen
Morten Nordholt Andersen
2006-01-25
Morning (09:00) Poul Peter Serek
Julia Grishina
Oleksandra Medvedyeva
Simon Helle Nielsen
Alma Bijedic
Rokas Firantas
Afternoon (13:00) Meang Akira Tanaka
Donald Nkamanyi Weledji
Maria Kinga Mochnacs
Ling Liu
WeiQing Hou
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Author:Ken Friis Larsen (ken@friislarsen.net)