CS 574: Parallel and Distributed Systems
Midterm Study Questions

Describe Pfister's main arguments for the need to study cluster technology
versus other popular aggregate computing systems.

Describe the architectural characteristics of Clusters, SMPs, and NUMA
architectures, and describe the workload characteristics that each is
best at.

Describe typical race conditions one might find involving applications
of each of shared memory, message-passing, shared I/O , and
multi-threaded computations.

Describe the differences between descriptive and prescriptive programming
models, and give examples of each.

Describe how the BSP model accounts for communication costs, and 
describe how the model enables the reduction of communication costs
at a systems level.

Describe why standard communication protocols like TCP/IP have such
high overheads.

Describe how "shared nothing" differs from "multi-tailed" architectures.

Describe what is meant by the term "cluster operating system" and how
does it differ from SMP OSs and typical "distributed" operating
systems.