Distributed Operating System / What is Distributed Operating System? / Types of Distributed Operating System / Distributed Shared Memory / Distributed OS lecture notes, questions, exams, and other materials / Example of Distributed OSs
Distributed OS
With the advent of computer networks, in which many computers are linked together and are able to communicate with one another, distributed computing
became feasible. A distributed computation is one that is carried out
on more than one machine in a cooperative manner. A group of linked
computers working cooperatively on tasks, referred to as a distributed
system, often requires a distributed operating system to manage the
distributed resources. Distributed operating systems must handle all the
usual problems of operating systems, such as deadlock. Distributed
deadlock is very difficult to prevent; it is not feasible to number all
the resources in a distributed system. Hence, deadlock must be detected
by some scheme that incorporates substantial communication among network
sites and careful synchronization, lest network delays cause deadlocks
to be falsely detected and processes aborted unnecessarily. Interprocess
communication must be extended to processes residing on different
network hosts, since the loosely coupled architecture of computer
networks requires that all communication be done by message passing.
Important systems concerns unique to the distributed case are workload
sharing, which attempts to take advantage of access to multiple
computers to complete jobs faster; task migration, which supports
workload sharing by efficiently moving jobs among machines; and
automatic task replication at different sites for greater reliability.
List of Distributed Operating Systems
l. IRIX operating system; was the operating system developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) to run natively on their MIPS workstations and servers
2. AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) is a series of proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM for several of its computer platforms.
3. Solaris operating system; Solaris is a Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It superseded their earlier SunOS in 1993. Oracle Solaris, as it is now known, has been owned by Oracle Corporation since Oracle's acquisition of Sun in January 2010for SUN multiprocessor workstations.
4. Mac OS is a multi-threading and multitasking UNIX compatible operating system;