Distributed Systems

Week one’s research topic was distributed systems, here is a bit about them:

Distributed Systems are hardware and software systems containing more than one processing or storage element, concurrent processes, or multiple programs.

This is useful in situations where a very large computational problem needs to be solved and resources, such as supercomputers, are not as easily available.  With DS, a task may be split up into smaller chunks of data and performed and processed by the many computers owned via the general public.  Examples of some such projects are BOINC (open-source software for volunteer computing and grid computing) and SETI@HOME (searching for extraterrestrial intelligence).

These systems also incorporate concepts to design programs to run on many processing cores as multi-core systems become more widely used.

More information can be found within this wiki.

Installing IIS

I installed an IIS server on my virtual machine by the use of the add/remove windows components.

Whilst checking the web server service to be installed, a number of other services were set to be installed as well. Windows prompted me twice for the location of the install disk, which i had to change from D:\ drive to C:\.

After the installation was complete I was able to go into Firefox browsing localhost to connect to the web server, however could not browse to it in Internet Explorer. I was able to put a simple html page into the C:\InetPub\wwwroot\ folder named test.htm and navigate to localhost/test.htm in order to view it.

The only web server I have previous experience with is Apache, so it will be interesting to learn some other ones too.