distributed-system

Good Reads for Distributed Systems

I am working on a server system that going to have a distributed architecture. Can anyone recommend some good (titles|urls|blogs) on programming distributed architectures, P2P, Master/Slave, etc..? It will be implemented in WCF. ...

Distributed System Diagramming Best Practices?

I was wondering if anyone has some best practices to follow when diagramming distributed systems. Not being much of a visual designer I typically go through hours and several iterations till I reach the point where I feel the diagram matches the system. Of course after I show it to someone else I spend more hours cleaning and rearranging...

Parallel processing of database queue

There is small system, where a database table as queue on MSSQL 2005. Several applications are writing to this table, and one application is reading and processing in a FIFO manner. I have to make it a little bit more advanced to be able to create a distributed system, where several processing application can run. The result should be t...

Are PHP sessions hard to scale across a distributed system?

At work we do almost everything in Java and perl, but I wanted to build out a feature using PHP and sessions. Some peeps thought that it was a bad idea to try to do PHP sessions on our system, cause it's distributed to many servers. What would the specific problem be? ...

Best distributed filesystem for commodity linux storage farm

I have a lot of spare intel linux servers laying around (hundreds) and want to use them for a distributed file system in a web hosting and file sharing environment. This isn't for a HPC application, so high performance isn't critical. The main requirement is high availability, if one server goes offline, the data stored on it's hard dr...

Amazon S3 architecture

While the post @ http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture explains Amazon's architecture in general, I am interested in knowing how Amazon S3 is implemented. Some of my guesses are A distributed file system like HDFS http://hadoop.apache.org/core/docs/current/hdfs_design.html A non relational persistent DB like CouchDB http://co...

Analogs of Intel's Cluster OpenMP

Hello Are there analogs of Intel Cluster OpenMP? This library simulates shared-memory machine (like SMP or NUMA) while running on distributed memory machine (like Ethernet-connected cluster of PC's). This library allows to start openmp programs directly on cluster. ...

Race condition tools

I work in a networking product that is based on message passing. Most of the code is native and lots of critical components are in assembly. So, when we do a feature we write the IPC elements and the assembly part. The assembly code (more than 20 processors) works on what is setup (in memory) by the IPC processing (2 processors) . My pro...

Which DHT algorithm to use (if I want to join two separate DHTs)?

I've been looking into some DHT systems, specially Pastry and Chord. I've read some concerns about Chord's reaction to churn, though I believe that won't be a problem for the task I have at hands. I'm implementing some sort of social network service that doesn't rely on any central servers for a course project. I need the DHT for the loo...

What is the difference between Java RMI and JMS?

When designing an distributed application in Java there seem to be a few technologies that address the same kind of problem. I have briefly read about Java Remote Method Invocation and Java Message Service, but it is hard to really see the difference. Java RMI seems to be more tightly coupled than JMS because JMS uses asynchronous commun...

How to design a distributed application using a Message Broker and a Database?

I would like to implement an distributed Point-Of-Sale system, somewhat like the one described in Point of sale app architecture advice. It is a distributed system with these charachteristics: The clients are mission critical, they should work even if the network connection or the server fails, but just for a few days or so. The clien...

What library can I use to do simple, lightweight message passing?

I will be starting a project which requires communication between distributed nodes(the project is in C++). I need a lightweight message passing library to pass very simple messages(basically just strings of text) between nodes. The library must have the following characteristics: No external setup required. I need to be able to get ev...

ZooKeeper and RabbitMQ/Qpid together - overkill or a good combination?

Greetings, I'm evaluating some components for a multi-data center distributed system. We're going to be using message queues (via either RabbitMQ or Qpid) so agents can make asynchronous requests to other agents without worrying about addressing, routing, load balancing or retransmission. In many cases, the agents will be interacting w...

Framework or tool for "distributed unit testing"?

Is there any tool or framework able to make it easier to test distributed software written in Java? My system under test is a peer-to-peer software, and I'd like to perform testing using something like PNUnit, but with Java instead of .Net. The system under test is a framework I'm developing to build P2P applications. It uses JXTA as a ...

How to make my Java Swing application a Client-Server application?

I have made a Java Swing application. Now I would like to make it a Client-Server application. All clients should be notified when data on the server is changed, so I'm not looking for a Web Service. The Client-Server application will be run on a single LAN, it's a business application. The Server will contain a database, JavaDB. What t...

Integrity and Confidentiality in Distributed Transactions

Hello! I've a question regarding distributed transactions. Let's assume I have 3 transaction programs: Transaction A begin a=read(A) b=read(B) c=a+b write(C,c) commit Transaction B begin a=read(A) a=a+1 write(A,a) commit Transaction C begin c=read(C) c=c*2 write(A,c) commit So there are 5 pairs of critical operations: C2-A5...

Travelling software. Is that a concept?

Hi! I would like to ask if there existed a program, which were intended to travel (for example following some physical forces) across the planet, possibly occupying and freeing computational resources/nodes. Literally that means that some agent-based system is just regularly changing it's location and (inevitably to some extent) configu...

MPI Large Data all to all transfer

My application of MPI has some process that generate some large data. Say we have N+1 process (one for master control, others are workers), each of worker processes generate large data, which is now simply write to normal file, named file1, file2, ..., fileN. The size of each file may be quite different. Now I need to send all fileM to r...

web application testing framework suggestions

Anyone have good experience with a web application testing framework? We are in process of selecting one for our application written in C#, ASP.NET etc., but the framework can be anything (unless, of course, choosing one written in C# helps somehow). The application is distributed. What we would like (ideally) is: Something that will ...

What are some good interview questions for Distributed Systems?

For a job that has a bend for distributed systems, what would you ask the candidate? Easy, intermediate and advanced questions are all welcome. I don't have specific requirements for the job. General questions are fine. On top of my head I can think of: Advanced (?) 2-phase commit protocol 3-phase commit protocol ...