Distributed System Design

<p>Future requirements for computing speed system reliability and cost-effectiveness entail the development of alternative computers to replace the traditional von Neumann organization. As computing networks come into being one of the latest dreams is now possible - distributed computing. <br>Distributed computing brings transparent access to as much computer power and data as the user needs for accomplishing any given task - simultaneously achieving high performance and reliability.<br>The subject of distributed computing is diverse and many researchers are investigating various issues concerning the structure of hardware and the design of distributed software. Distributed System Design defines a distributed system as one that looks to its users like an ordinary system but runs on a set of autonomous processing elements (PEs) where each PE has a separate physical memory space and the message transmission delay is not negligible. With close cooperation among these PEs the system supports an arbitrary number of processes and dynamic extensions.<br>Distributed System Design outlines the main motivations for building a distributed system including:</p><li>inherently distributed applications<br> </li><li>performance/cost<br> </li><li>resource sharing<br> </li><li>flexibility and extendibility<br> </li><li>availability and fault tolerance<br> </li><li>scalability<br>Presenting basic concepts problems and possible solutions this reference serves graduate students in distributed system design as well as computer professionals analyzing and designing distributed/open/parallel systems.<br>Chapters discuss:<br> </li><li>the scope of distributed computing systems<br> </li><li>general distributed programming languages and a CSP-like distributed control description language (DCDL)<br> </li><li>expressing parallelism interprocess communication and synchronization and fault-tolerant design<br> </li><li>two approaches describing a distributed system: the time-space view and the interleaving view<br> </li><li>mutual exclusion and related issues including election bidding and self-stabilization<br> </li><li>prevention and detection of deadlock<br> </li><li>reliability safety and security as well as various methods of handling node communication Byzantine and software faults<br> </li><li>efficient interprocessor communication mechanisms as well as these mechanisms without specific constraints such as adaptiveness deadlock-freedom and fault-tolerance<br> </li><li>virtual channels and virtual networks<br> </li><li>load distribution problems<br> </li><li>synchronization of access to shared data while supporting a high degree of concurrency</li>