Distributed Computer Architecture Group 3: David Bingham, Alex Blaes, Pierce Henson, Joseph Napier, William Stancil

What is Distributed Computer Architecture?

❏ Distributed Architecture systems consist of a network of autonomous computers that cooperate in order to achieve a goal ❏ The computers are completely independent of each other and do not physically share any hardware ❏ They communicate with each other by transferring messages from one computer to another over a network ❏ Messages can tell other computers to execute a procedure with specific arguments, send and receive packets of data, or send signals that affect the receiver's behavior.

❏ Computers in a distributed system have different roles ❏ Role depends on the goal of the system and the computer's hardware and software properties ❏ Two ways of organizing computers in distributed systems ❏ Client-server architecture ❏ Peer-to-peer architecture

History

❏ Mainframes - IBM System ❏ ARPANET (Earliest example of Distributed Computing) ❏ Local Area Networks ❏

Creeper and Reaper (

1st Distributed Computing virus) ❏ Parallel Architecture ❏ Clusters ❏ DCOM(used Remote procedure calls(RPCs)) ❏ HTTP/XML(Web and Client Communication) ❏ Grids (Seti@Home)

Client-Server Architecture

The concepts of

client

and

server

are powerful functional abstractions. A server is simply a unit that provides a service, possibly to multiple clients simultaneously, and a client is a unit that consumes the service. The clients do not need to know the details of how the service is provided, or how the data they are receiving is stored or calculated, and the server does not need to know how the data is going to be used.

Peer-to-Peer Architecture

❏ -Peer-to-peer systems divide computing labor equally. ❏ -All computers in this system send and receive data and contribute some processing and computing power back ❏ -Unlike Client-server architecture, peer-to-peer has no central server, and all nodes on the system in a p2p network share files with each other equally ❏ -P2P systems have an advantage in smaller settings, but tend to have issues managing nodes in higher system counts ❏ ❏ -Security also is a huge disadvantage in P2P systems, as a computer sharing resources doesn’t check who’s accessing these resources -P2P systems are most commonly used in data transfer and data storage, such as torrents and Skype

Applications

Future

❏ Ubiquitous Computing ❏

“First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing...when technology recedes into the background of our lives”

(p575, Null & Lobur).

❏ Embedded technology

References

❏ http://wla.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa11/lectures/communication.html

❏ http://ifs.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Books/SE7/Presentations/PDF/ch12.pdf

❏ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/understanding-the-differences-between-client server-and-peer-to-peer-networks/ ❏ Computer Organization and Architechture, Fourth Edition, Linda Null and Julia Lobur