Roll No.

I.T.S Engineering College, Greater Noida

Pre University Test (Session 2012-13)
B. Tech (Even Semester Theory Examination)
Distributed System (ECS-701)
Branch: Information Technology
Semester: VIII
1. Attempt any four parts

Total Marks: 100

Time: 3 hours
5 x 4 = 20

a. What are the Distributed Systems? What are the significant advantages and limitations of
Distributed System? Explain with the examples.
b. Discuss the causal ordering of messages in Distributed System. If the process P sends two
messages M1 and M2 to another process Q, what problem may arise if the two messages are not
received by recipient Q in order they were sent by the process P? Develop an algorithm which
guarantees the causal order of messages in Distributed System.
c. What do you mean by Distributed Mutual Exclusion? Many distributed algorithms require the
use of a coordinate process. To what extent can such algorithm actually considered distributed?
Discuss.
d. Discuss at least three main issues that are relevant to the understanding of distributed, fault
tolerant real time systems and what makes them important.
e. What is a process? Explain the various states of a process through state transition diagram.
2. Attempt any Two parts

10 x 2 = 20

a. What are Agreement protocols? Discuss the general system model where agreement protocols
are used. What are Agreement and validity objects of Byzantine Agreement Problems
b. Explain the Two Phase commit protocol used for realizing atomicity in a distributed system.
Explain what happens when the messages are corrupt or nodes fail.
c. What are the difference between a file service using upload/download model and one using the
remote access model? What is the difference between tree structured directory systems from
general graph structured system?
3. Attempt any Two parts
10 x 2 = 20
a. Explain the following with suitable examples:
i. Remote object reference
ii. Remote interface
b. Compare and contrast the methods of concurrency control for transactions. Explain the methods
for concurrency control in distributed system.
c. In the context of distributed file system explain the following:
i. Mounting
iii. Hints
ii. Caching
iv. Bulk data transfer
ECS - 701

Page 1

4. Attempt any Two parts

10 x 2 = 20

a. With reference to the backward error recovery explain the Operation based approach and state
based approach.
b. What is voting protocol? Compare and contrast static and dynamic vote protocols.
c. What are the locks? What are essential difference in the lock-based protocols and time stampedbased protocols?
5. Attempt any Two parts

10 x 2 = 20

a. Write short notes on any two of the following

i. CORBA Services
ii. Balanced sliding window protocol
iii. ARP problem
b. How will you execute the transaction when data is replicated among the several sites and data
consistency is highest criteria? Also discuss the case when data availability is highest criteria.
c. What do you mean by failure? Give the classification of failure with illustrating the examples.

ECS - 701

Page 2