Nida’s Awesome Distributed Systems Notes

Hi everyone,

My name’s Nida and I wrote some really awesome notes that James even uploaded to his webspace for me – but I forgot to put the link on the blog! Gah! Silly me!

Here’s the link to them.

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Distributed Computing – Architectures

This post is going to be mainly about the architectures employed by a distributed system and I don’t mean this kind of architecture:

There are two main types of architectures that we shall be looking at those which are…

• Tightly Coupled– several machines which are highly integrated, which may seem and work like a single computer.

Distributed Computing – Parallel Computation

Why would you even want to use 100’s or even 1000’s of computers? What would you do with such a large number of networked computers?

Well the simplest answer is that there are many applications that we utilize which require good response time, such as Search engines, and File sharing. By increasing the number of computers working in parallel we can actually increase the execution time, giving users faster responses to resource queries.

• Parallel computing – utilizing multiple CPU’s within a single computer
• Distributed Computing – utilizing several computers connected through a network

Distributed Computing – Challenges

Okay sooo distributed systems are spread out over vast distances. Due to this attribute there are many issues and challenges surrounding such distributed systems some of which are discussed below! Enjoy!

Challenge No.1 – Heterogeneity

Heterogeneity – “Describes a system consisting of multiple distinct components”