98-Comp-B10 Distributed Systems — National Examinations, December 2016. 3 hours, closed book, non-programmable calculator only. Candidates were instructed to answer any five of the seven questions, all carrying equal weight and mostly requiring essay-format answers; all seven are answered below as a complete study resource.
Reference texts: Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg & Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (5th ed.) — system models, peer-to-peer systems, middleware and client-server architecture (ch. 1–2), interprocess communication and the request-reply protocol (ch. 4–5), operating system support for distributed systems (ch. 7), security (ch. 11), distributed file systems (ch. 12), and time, coordination, replication and fault tolerance (ch. 14–15, 18).
Check — source parsing artifact. Every question header on this paper is printed as “Question # N.” (a literal hash between the word and the number). Separately, Questions 1 and 7 each print their third sub-part re-using the letter “a.” instead of continuing the alphabet; both are relettered below (a), (b), (c) in the order printed, with no change to content or intent.
