Distributed
Computing
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Distributed Computing
• A distributed computer system consists of multiple software components that are
on multiple computers, but run as a single system.
• The computers that are in a distributed system can be physically close together
and connected by a local network, or they can be geographically distant and
connected by a wide area network.
• A distributed system can consist of any number of possible configurations, such
as mainframes, personal computers, workstations, minicomputers, and so on. The
goal of distributed computing is to make such a network work as a single
computer.
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Distributed Computing
• There are several advantages of this system over
traditional computing models such as scalability,
reliability, flexibility.
• Distributed computing has many forms such as cluster
computing, grid computing ,cloud computing etc.
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Cluster Computing
• Cluster computing involves connecting multiple
computers (nodes) together to work as a single
integrated computing resource. These nodes are usually
connected in a local area network (LAN) and are used to
solve complex computational tasks.
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Cluster Computing
Characteristics of this computing:
❑Many similar machines, close interconnection
❑Often special, standardized hardware (racks, blades)
❑Usually owned and used by a single organization
However, these cluster of machines require a massive amount of
power and cooling mechanism. Therefore, these clusters are
moved into separate building known as data center
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Grid Computing
• Grid computing is a form of distributed computing where
resources from various sources are combined to solve big
computational problems.
• It allows resources to be shared and combined across computers
located in diverse geographical areas and networks.
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Grid Computing
• Grids use special software (middleware) to manage and
distribute tasks across diverse and widely spread
resources and authorize any process that is being
executed on the network.
• Grids are typically used for scientific, engineering, and
research applications that require substantial
computational power.
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Cloud Computing
• Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient,
on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable
computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned
and released with minimal management effort or
service provider interaction.
• It provides a wide range of services that can be
distinguished into 3 catogery: SaaS, PaaS and IaaS
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What is virtualization?
Bo
b
Charli
Alic e
e
Physical
machine Dani
el
■ Suppose Alice has a machine with 4 CPUs and 8
GB of memory, and three customers:
■ Bob wants a machine with 1 CPU and 3GB of memory
■ Charlie wants 2 CPUs and 1GB of memory
■ Daniel wants 1 CPU and 4GB of memory
■ What should Alice do?
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What is virtualization?
Bo
b
Virtual
machin
e
Charli
monito
Alic e
r
e
Physical
machine Dani
Virtual
machines el
■ Alice can sell each customer a virtual machine
(VM) with the requested resources
■ From each customer's perspective, it appears as if
they had a physical machine all by themselves
(isolation)
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What is virtualization?
• Virtualization is a technique to separate a service from the
underlying physical delivery of that service.
• Virtualization allows sharing of a single physical instance
of a resource or an application among multiple customers
and organizations at one time.
• It is a key characteristics of cloud computing that provides
the required isolation, abstraction and encapsulation
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Security Issues
• Cloud computing provides improved, optimized, and low
cost services to the customers through virtualization and
multi-tenancy architecture.
• The use of cloud technologies, service models, and
deployment methods brings about specific security risks
and vulnerabilities unique to the cloud environment.
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Security Issues
• Issues at communication level :
We divide the cloud communication into two categories,
namely: (a) communication external to the cloud
(b) communication internal to the cloud
The challenges faced by the external communication are
same as the challenges of conventional IT communication.
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Security Issues
• Shared communication infrastructure:
o The sharing of network components provides attacker
the window of cross-tenant attack.
o Service providers often restrict users from conducting
vulnerability scans to avoid confusion with potential
cyberattacks, ensuring the security and stability of their
networks.
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Security Issues
• Issues at Virtual network:
o The virtual networks are responsible for communication between
VMs. Security and protection mechanisms over the physical network
are not able to monitor the traffic over virtualized network.
o Intrusion detection and prevention mechanisms usually depend on
the traffic patterns and activities to judge the anomalies and detect
the possibility of the attack. Virtualized network poses a hindrance
to the goal of such preventive measures
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Security Issues
• Security misconfigurations:
o A small misconfiguration can breach the security of the system.
o One of the most common misconfiguration occur when
administrators select such a configuration tool that they are
familiar with but not necessarily covers all the security
requirements.
o This can lead to data leakage of private information of customers.
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Security Issues
As a security measure for these attacks, Advanced cloud protection
system has been proposed where :
• VMs are constantly monitored.
• auditability for the actions of VMs.
• interceptor module is used for detecting any suspicious activities
To avoid misconfigurations, workforce needs to be extensively
trained with appropriate knowledge of the entire framework.
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Security Issues
• Virtualization issues:
o Virtualization can lead to data breach and cross-VM attacks.
Isolation is required storage devices, memory and hardware
level.
o During the migration phase, the contents of VM as well as the
source code of the VM itself becomes exposed to the network.
o A successful VM escape attack can provide access to the
computing and storage hardware
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Security Issues
• Virtualization issues:
o The key module of virtualization is hypervisor or VMM.
A compromised VMM can put all the VMs that are
managed by the victim VMM under attacker’s control.
The metadata of the VMs, kept by the VMM, may also be
exposed to an attacker if the attacker takes control of a
VMM.
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Security Issues
• Strategies to mitigating thse risks:
o The stored VMs should be encrypted.
o Built in security measures should be adopted for
virtualized OS
o Hypervisor state monitoring through third party
o Third party security technology should be used
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Security Issues
• Data/storage issues:
o Data privacy and integrity
o Data recovery vulnerability
o Data backup
The users and organizations are encouraged to use standard
encryption algorithms with off-the-shelf-technology.
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Reliability in CC
• Reliability in cloud computing is how consistently a cloud
computing system is able to provide its services without
interruption and failure.
• Cloud computing is a service-oriented architecture so the
attributes of the reliability rely on service models
• If a failure event has occurred at a particular instance, then partial
or even delayed services need to be delivered. The recovery
should be done with minimum intervention of human.
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Reliability in CC
Service Failure Management in Cloud Computing:
Ensuring reliable services in cloud computing involves effectively
handling service failures. Service failure management techniques
are categorized into two groups:
1. Reactive Failure Management and
2. Proactive Failure Management
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Reliability in CC
Reactive Failure Management : In this model, measures are
taken after the occurrence of failure. Whenever failures have
occurred in cloud services,
the required measures will be taken by restarting the services from
the last
execution instance recorded earlier using checkpointing or logging.
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Reliability in CC
Checkpointing:
• In this method, current state of a running process is saved on
some backup resources and on the occurrence of failure, the
process will be restarted or rolled back by using the last saved
state.
• It has been proved that using checkpointing task competition time
can be reduced to linear from exponential.
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Reliability in CC
Checkpointing:
• On the basis of the working principle, checkpointing has divided
been into three different categories such as Uncoordinated
Checkpointing, Coordinated Checkpointing and Communication
Induced Checkpointing.
• The determination of optimal checkpointing interval is a crucial
design decision for system performance.
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Reliability in CC
Logging:
• Each process is recorded or saved in its present state and
messages are sent periodically as the logs at some stable storage.
When a process crashes, a new process is created on the place of
a crashed process by using the recorded logs.
• The logs are saved in the order of the operations execution for
regeneration of a process in case of a failure.
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Reliability in CC
Logging:
• In the event of a failure, the system can use the log to either
replay the operations that were lost or undo the operations that
were only partially completed. This ensures that the system can
recover to a consistent state and avoid orphan process.
• To avoid logging overheads, system can combine checkpointing
and logging.
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Reliability in CC
Redundancy:
Here, the backup resources are used to run replicas of the running
processes.
On the basis of updating of running replicas to handle the
inconsistency, replication has divided into two categories :
• Primary Backup (Passive) replication
• Active replication
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Reliability in CC
Proactive Failure Management :
• In this method, the prevention measures are taken before the
occurrence of failure.
• The productivity of proactive failure management methods depends
upon the prediction of the occurrence of the failures.
• On the basis of the failure prediction results, the running processes
are migrated from the suspected resource to other healthy
resource for an uninterruptable execution.
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Reliability in CC
Proactive Failure Management :
• Migration method is used to provide fault tolerance by
incorporating failure prediction methods.
• Due to the dynamic nature of the cloud infrastructure, VM
migration based fault-tolerance methods more popular.
• There are 2 approaches for VM migration: Pre-copy VM Migration
Approach and Post-copy VM Migration Approach.
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Reliability in CC
Pre-copy VM Migration Approach :
• Hypervisor copies the state of the running VMs such as CPU state,
memory state, and state of other devices and the VM stops at the
source machine. This is the warm up phase.
• The stop and copy phase copies the remaining les or pages (if any) in
the memory that gets modfied (dirty pages) during the warm-up phase.
• After the transfer of all the pages the virtual machine resumes its
execution over the destination machine
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Reliability in CC
Post-copy VM Migration Approach :
• The process involves suspending running virtual machines (VMs) at the source
nodes and then migrating them to the destination nodes.
• During this migration, only partial attributes of the execution state are transferred,
including details such as CPU state and register usage. At the destination, the VMs
resumes with the execution.
• In parallel the source machine also stay active serving the migrated VMs.
• Whenever a VM does not find a page in its local memory, destination machine
redirects the page request to the source machine which in-turn responds with the
faulted page
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Green ICT
Green IT (green information technology) is the practice of creating and using
environmentally sustainable computing resources.
Green IT aims to minimize the negative effects of IT operations on the
environment by designing, manufacturing, operating and disposing of
servers, PCs and other computer-related products in an environmentally
friendly manner.
The motives behind green IT practices include reducing the use of hazardous
materials, maximizing energy efficiency during a product's lifetime, and
promoting the biodegradability of unused and outdated products.
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Green ICT
Importance of green ICT:
• Climate change
• Compliance
• Competitive advantage
• Reduced use of energy and other natural resources
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Green ICT
Challenges of green ICT:
1. Cost
2. Cultural pushback
3. Prioritization
4. Conflicting initiatives
5. Emerging fields
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Reference
• Web
• Security in cloud computing: Opportunities and challenges Mazhar Ali,
Samee U. Khan, Athanasios V. Vasilakos
• Reliability and Energy Efficiency in Cloud Computing Systems: Survey and
Taxonomy-Yogesh Sharma, Bahman Javadi, Weisheng Si,Daniel Sun
• https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/green-IT-green-information-
technology
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