Process Management in Distributed System

Q.1: What is a distributed process Scheduler?

Answer:

A distributed process scheduler is one of the critical component responsible for allocating resources to various different processes. It aims to achieve load balancing by managing the execution, scheduling and other process related tasks across multiple nodes.

In simple words, it basically decides which process shall be executed on which node.

Q.2: What are the challenges in process management in Distributed Systems?

Answer:

Following are the major challenges that one will come across while designing the process maangement part :-

Scheduling a process to a specific node, migrating a process along with its state to another node in case of overload (load balancing), synchronizing the state of every process, maintaining data consistency among the processes operating on same data etc.

Q.3: What is a Middleware in distributed Operating System ?

Answer:

The middleware acts as the intermediatory between the distributed OS and the applications that run on it. It has various responsibilities such as load balancing, remote procedure calls (RPCs) etc.

Load balancing is best achieved by the use of middleware. Every request made by the client application will first be received on the middleware and it will have all the information regarding which node is serving how many processes and it will delegate request on the node which is serving smaller amount of requests.

Remote Procedure Calls in the middleware system aids in invoking method calls on processes running on remote machines as if they were local.

Q.4: How do distributed system handles process synchronization in process management?

Answer:

Process management part of distributed System utilises various mechanism like distributed locks, semaphore and other locking techniques to ensure that the processes that are operating doesn’t interfere with each other.

Q.5: What are some examples of Distributed Systems ?

Answer:

Most common example that you’d be familiar with is world-wide-web (WWW), cloud computing platforms such as Google Cloud platform (GCP), Amazon web Services (AWS), Azure, networks.

We can observe that among these, any number of users can register, perform operations based on their specific requirements from any parts of the world. Hence the distributed system concept is very crucial in operating these such softwares.

A distributed System is a collection of autonomous nodes (computers, servers, and other networking devices) that work together in coordination and serve a single purpose. These nodes will have a single goal to maintain consistency among them, perform certain operations on the data, communicate, share resources, and keep the distributed system functioning properly.

In a system such as this, process management becomes a crucial part of maintaining & monitoring the overall system. These nodes are geographically distributed across the world and are interconnected through a network.