ICT Distributed Systems

DISTRIBUTED Systems is another big name in Information and Communications Technology, or ICT subject under the Technical Vocational Learning track for senior high school students.

What is it all about? According to Techopedia, a distributed system is a network that consists of autonomous computers that are connected using a distribution middleware. They help in sharing different resources and capabilities to provide users with a single and integrated coherent network.

The key features of a distributed system in ICT are as follows: (1) Components in the system are concurrent. A distributed system allows resource sharing, including software by systems connected to the network at the same time; (2) There can be multiple components, but they will generally be autonomous in nature; (3) A global clock is not required in a distributed system. The systems can be spread across different geographies; (4) Compared to other network models, there is greater fault tolerance in a distributed model; and (5) Price/performance ratio is much better.

In ICT, students will be have an introduction and overview of software architectures for distributed systems.

Processes and communication such as threads and virtualisation among clients and servers on communication fundamentals, remote procedure calls and message-oriented communication are discussed.

Naming and synchronisation such as names, identifiers, adresses, flat naming, structured naming, attribute based naming, clock sync hr on is at ion, logic clocks, mutual exclusion, GPS, election algoritms will all also be tackled.

Consistency, replication, and fault tolerance will not be missed. Data-centric and client-centric consistency models, replication management, consistency protocols, process resilience, trusted client- server communication, trusted group communication, distributed commit protocols and recovery are all part of an overview.

Lastly, the behaviour and properties of major cryptographic algoritms will be studied as well. It will be shown how cryptographic focus on building blocks that can be combined to crypto protocols. These protocols are constructed to realise security goals. ( Paid article)