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Architectural Support For Designing Fault-Tolerant Open Distributed Systems, Salim Hariri, Alok Choudhary, Behcet Sarikaya

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

A distributed system consists of autonomous computing modules that interact with each other using messages. Designing distributed systems is more difficult than designing centralized systems for several reasons. Physical separation and the use of heterogeneous computers complicate interprocessor communication, management of resources, synchronization of cooperating activities, and maintenance of consistency among multiple copies of information. The main advantages of distributed systems include increased fault-tolerance capabilities through the inherent redundancy of resources, improved performance by concurrently executing a single task on several computing modules, resource sharing, and the ability to adapt to a changing environment (extensibility). Distributed systems cover a wide …