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Roll No:
(To be filled in by the candidate)

PSG COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY, COIMBATORE - 641 004

SEMESTER EXAMINATIONS, APRIL 2018

BE – COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING Semester : 6

15Z603 DISTRIBUTED OPERATING SYSTEM

Time : 3 Hours Maximum Marks : 100

INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Answer ALL questions. Each question carries 20 Marks.
2. Subdivision (a) carries 3 marks each, subdivision (b) carries 7 marks each and
subdivision (c) carries 10 marks each.
3. Course Outcome : Qn.1
CO.1 Qn.2 CO.2 Qn.3 CO.3 Qn.4 CO.4 Qn.5 CO5.
Table ...… ..… ...… …… ....…
…. …. …. . ….
1. a) For a pre-emptive process migration, is a stateful/ stateless server preferable? Reason
out your answer.
b) Elaborate on the various types of failures that occur in distributed operating systems.
c) Consider that railway reservation system is implemented using Distributed
environment. List out the possible types of transparencies need to be incorporated in
the system. Justify your answers.
2. a) Which of the following operations are idempotent?
Seek (filename,position)
Write_record (filename, after-record_n, record)
Increment (variable_name)
b) (i) Suggest whether atleast once or exactly once semantics should be used for each of
the following applications. (4)
-For making a request to the file server to read a file.
-For making a request to append some data to an existing file.
Justify your suggestion.
(ii) How does buffering helps to achieve synchronization between sender and the
receiver? (3)
c) (i) What is stub? How are they generated? How does the use of stubs help in making a
Remote procedure call transparent?
(OR)
(ii) Elaborate on the classification of RPC Servers based on the time duration of
survival.
3. a) What is a phantom deadlock? What might be the reason for phantom deadlocks in
distributed systems?

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b) What are logical clocks? Describe in detail the approaches for implementation of
logical clocks with examples.
c) i) Consider a distributed system that has three types of resources R1, R2 and R3
with 2,2,2 units each. Processes P1, P2, P3 and P4 are competing for resources as
follows.
i) P1 holding 1 unit of R1 and is requesting for 1 unit for R2.
ii) P2 holding 2 units of R2 and is requesting 1 unit of each R1 and R3.
iii) P3 holding 1 unit of R1 and is requesting 1 unit of R2.
iv) P4 holding 2 units of R3 and is requesting 1 unit of R1.
Determine whether the system is deadlocked. Describe methods to recover from
the deadlock .
(OR)
ii) A server manages the objects a1, a2 , ... an. It provides two operations for its
clients:
read(i) returns the value of ai and write(i, Value) assigns Value to ai
The transactions T, U and V are defined as follows:
T: x = read(i); write(j, 44); U: write(i, 55); write(j, 66); V: write(k, 77); write(k, 88);
Describe the information written to the log file on behalf of these three transactions if
strict two-phase locking is in use and U acquires ai and aj before T. Describe how the
recovery manager would use this information to recover the effects of T, U and V
when the server is replaced after a crash. What is the significance of the order of the
commit entries in the log file?
4. a) What is process migration? List out the advantages of process migration.
b) Differentiate between casual consistency and release consistency. Which of the two
will you prefer to use in the design of a DSM system? Give reasons for your answer.
c) A system consists of three processors p1, p2 and p3 and a process having four tasks
t1, t2, t3 and t4. Suppose Eij is the cost of executing task ti on processor pj and cij is the
communication cost between task ti and tj when the two tasks are assigned to different
processors. Let E11 = 31, E12 = 4, E13 = 14, E21 = 1, E22 = 5, E23 = 6, E31 = 2, E32 = 4,
E33 = 24, E41 = 3, E42 = 28, E43 = 10, C12 = 35, C13= 3, C14 = 8, C23 = 6, C24 = 4 and
C34 = 23. Find an optimal assignment of the tasks to the processors and calculate the
cost of optimal assignment.
5. a) Mention the use of name cache? Give the types of name caches.
b) What is name resolution? Elaborate on the methods of interacting with the name
servers during name resolution.
c) Consider a distributed system using a single hierarchical name space for its human
oriented names. The qualified names in this name space are likely to be long, having
too many component names. Therefore, it may be convenient for a user to specify the
qualified name of an object every time he/she wants to use it. Suggest and explain two
methods that may be used to solve this problem. Discuss the relative advantages and
disadvantages of both the methods.

/END/
FD/RL

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