ONLINE EXAMINATIONS APRIL-JUNE 2023

IMPORTANT - You must read this before you start your exam

Academic Integrity

We are treating this online examination as a time-limited open assessment. This means that:

• You are permitted to refer to published materials to aid you in your answers.

• Published sources must be referenced, including online sources (unless your Department

tells you otherwise).

• Over-reliance on published sources is considered to be poor academic practice.

Apart from appropriate referencing, you must ensure that:

• the work you submit is entirely your own;

• you do not communicate with other students on the topic of this assessment for the whole

time the assessment is live;

• you do not obtain advice or contribution from any third party, including proof-readers,

friends, or family members.

For advice on academic integrity, you can see the University Library’s Academic Integrity Toolkit.

You should note that:

1. Failure to adhere to these requirements will be considered a breach of the Academic

Misconduct regulations (available here), where the offences of cheating, plagiarism,

collusion, copying, and commissioning are particularly relevant.

2. Your exam answers may be run through Turnitin, and the usual similarity reports will be

available to markers.

Please read and note this statement of originality:

By submitting this work, I certify that:

1. it is my own unaided work;

2. the use of material from other sources has been properly and fully acknowledged in

the text;

3. neither this piece of work nor any part of it has been submitted in connection with

another assessment;

4. I have read the University’s definition of plagiarism, guidance on good academic

practice and the guidelines set out above; and

5. I will comply with the requirements these place on me.

I acknowledge the University may use appropriate software to detect similarities with other

third-party material, in order to ensure the integrity of the assessment.

I understand that if I do not comply with these requirements the University will take action

against me, which if proven and following the proper process may result in failure of the

year or part and/or my removal from membership of the University.

V1

Please read through this exam paper thoroughly before you start the exam

April/May 2023 CS3DP19 2022/3 A 800

UNIVERSITY OF READING

DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS AND PARALLEL COMPUTING (CS3DP19)

One and a half hours

________________________________________________________________

Answer ANY TWO out of THREE Questions.

If a word limit is not specified next to a QUESTION then EACH QUESTION

(e.g. Q1, Q2, Q3, etc.) has a word limit of 1000 words.

This limit excludes scanned images of diagrams or hand-written formulas but

includes images with hand-written text.

Submit your answers to EACH QUESTION SEPARATELY to the relevant

submission point on Blackboard.

EACH Question is worth 20 marks.

Page 2

CS3DP19 2022/3 A 800

1. (a) In a distributed system, one way of ensuring data availability is to

replicate data across different servers. Consistent hashing is a

scheme which can be used to distribute data and its replicas

amongst servers around a ring. Consider a ring of size, M=101.

There are three servers whose ip addresses end in {10, 89, 169}.

The servers are positioned at p on the ring using the following two

hash functions: