Distributed Computing

Distributed Computing is a field of computer science and engineering that studies distributed systems. This type of computing includes multiple autonomous computers that each have their own memory and stroage as well as communication networks. The fact that multiple computing Systems are used make these Systems capable of handling big data. It covers a wide variety of modern technologies such as computing clusters, cloud computing, Grid computing, virtualization techniques, service-oriented architectures, massively parallel processors, peer-to-peer systems, and the Internet of Things. One interesting example is the open infrastructure for network computing (BOINC). More details about this system can be found here.

Compared to a centralized computer such as a laptop or desktop computer, it solves large-scale computational problems with multiple computers coupled over the Internet. Distributed computing becomes therefore often data-intensive and network-centric. The information exchange in such a distributedsystem is done via message passing. Distributed programs are programs that run as part of a distributed system. The process of writing distributed programsis known as distributed programming. This type of programming includes more challenges than a standard centralized software like addressing scalability, availability, fault tolerance, and security.

Distributed and parallel computing are closely connected and both take advantage of High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Throughput Computing (HTC) approaches. There is however a trend that HTC is rather used in business and HPC is more used in scientific applications. More recently, also energy consumption is getting important in distributed computing since it raises several monetary, performance, and even environmental issues. This is particular driven by the more recent demands of large quantities of data that require orders of magnitude more computing power for their analysis.

More about Distributed Computing

We refer to the following video about distributed computing:

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