Distributed Systems
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Distributed System Definition
According to Andrew Tannenbaum, a distributed system is a collection of independent computers that appear to their users as one computer. Specifically, there are three specific characteristics any distributed system must have:
- The computers operate concurrently
- The computers fail independently. They will fail, sooner or later.
- The computers do not share a global clock. All activities these computers perform are asynchronous with respect to the other components. This is a very important characteristics, as it imposes some essential limitations on what the distributed system can do.