What is a Distributed System
A distributed system is one that stops you
from getting any work done when a machine
you’ve never heard of crashes [Lamport]
Message-based communication, potentially
long delays, loose synchronization and
possibly no overall goal [Sloman]
Coordinated, collective action by
multiple computing agents [Seitz]
The fundamental properties are
fault tolerance and parallelism [Mullender]
Several computers doing something together => multiple computers, interconnections
and shared state [Schroeder]
Runs on a collection of machines that do not
have shared memory, yet looks to its users
like a single computer [Tanenbaum]