Distributed System Design - Wu, Jie

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Résumé :

Chapter 1 introduces some basic concepts, discusses the motivation of distributed computing systems, and presents the scope of distributed computing systems. A brief overview of the book is also provided. -- Chapter 2 surveys general distributed programming languages and introduces a CSP-like distributed control description language (DCDL). This language is used to describe several control issues such as expressing parallelism, interprocess communication and synchronization, and fault-tolerant design. A list of commonly used symbols in DCDL appears in the Appendix. -- Chapter 3 treats distributed systems in a formal way. Several concepts such as clock, event, and state are introduced as well as two approaches that describe a distributed system: the time-space view and the interleaving view. -- Chapter 4 addresses the problem of mutual exclusion which is the key issue for distributed systems design. Mutual exclusion ensures that mutually conflicting concurrent processes can share resources. We also discuss three issues that are related to the mutual exclusion problem: election, bidding, and self-stabilization. -- Chapter 5 studies prevention and detection of deadlock in a distributed system. Distributed systems, in general, exhibit a high degree of resource and data sharing...

Biographie:

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.
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.
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.
Distributed System Design outlines the main motivations for building a distributed system, including: