1. What is a Distributed Operating System (DOS)?
A distributed OS manages a collection of independent computers and makes them appear as a
single coherent system to users.
2. What is distributed scheduling?
Distributed scheduling assigns processes to multiple nodes in a distributed system to balance
load and improve performance.
3. Define load balancing in distributed systems.
Load balancing is the process of distributing workload across multiple machines to avoid
overload and improve resource utilization.
4. What is distributed communication?
It refers to communication between processes on different machines using message passing
(RPC, RMI, message queues).
5. What is RPC?
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) allows a program to call a procedure on a remote machine as if
it were local.
6. What is distributed synchronization?
Coordination of concurrent processes across different nodes using algorithms like Lamport’s
clock, token-based mutual exclusion.
7. What is Lamport’s Logical Clock?
A mechanism for ordering events in a distributed system using timestamps without relying on
physical clocks.
8. Define Distributed Mutual Exclusion.
It ensures that only one process across the distributed network enters a critical section at a
time.
9. What is NFS?
Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol that allows remote file access
over a network.
10. What is GFS?
Google File System (GFS) is a scalable distributed file system designed for large-scale data
processing applications.
11. What is HDFS?
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a fault-tolerant distributed file system optimized
for large data and batch processing.
12. What is transparency in distributed file systems?
Transparency hides the complexity of distributed resources from users (e.g., location
transparency).
13. Define fault tolerance in distributed systems.
Fault tolerance allows a system to continue functioning even when some components fail.
14. What is replication?
Replication stores multiple copies of data across different nodes to improve reliability and
performance.
15. What is metadata server?
A server that stores metadata (file names, directories, permissions) in distributed file systems
like GFS and HDFS.