Distributed Systems : Concepts and Design

The new edition of this bestselling title on Distributed Systems has been thoroughly revised throughout to reflect the state of the art in this rapidly developing field. It emphasizes the principles used in the design and construction of distributed computer systems based on networks of workstations and server computers.

to the state of the art today."

This second edition of the bestselling text on open distributed systems is comprehensively updated and expanded to reflect recent advances in the field. The approach is based on a uniform view of resources in distributed systems using client-server and group communication models. Design approaches emphasise openness, scalability, transparency, reliability and security.

The book begins with the foundations for open distributed systems including networking, interprocess communication, remote procedure calling, name services, distributed time management and file services. It introduces new technologies including ATM networking, internetworks, multicast protocols, microkernel-based distributed operating systems and distributed shared memory. It also covers the design of services supporting the sharing of distributed data, including replication, concurrency control, recovery, fault tolerance and security.

The material is supported by definitions of service interfaces and algorithms and by copious case studies. The case studies provide an excellent insight into the current state-of-the-art in distributed system design. They include:

Networking and interprocess communication: Ethernet, Token Ring, ATM networks, Internet, FLIP, Sun RPC, ANSA testbench, Firefly RPC, Amoeba multicast Distributed file systems: Sun NFS, Andrew File System, Coda Name services: DNS, GNS, X.500 Clock synchronization: Network Time Protocol Replication: ISIS and 'gossip' architecture Security: Kerberos Microkernel-based distributed operating systems: Mach, Chorus, Amoeba, Clouds, UNIX emulation Distributed shared memory: Ivy, Munin

George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore and Tim Kindberg have based this book on courses at masters and undergraduate level given to students at Queen Mary and Westfield College in the University of London.