Introduction to Distributed Computing
E. Luppi · 2020
This chapter provides a brief overview of distributed systems and their evolutions. It distinguishes two different families of distributed systems: network operating systems and true distributed system. Cluster computing is typically used for parallel programming in which a compute intensive program is executed in parallel on multiple machines. Cloud computing provides the facilities to dynamically construct an infrastructure and compose, from offered services, what is needed for compute-intensive applications, simply outsourcing resources. Grid computing is a distributed computing model aiming to provide a high throughput computing system, consisting of many computers communicating over a wide area network, able to distribute jobs execution across a virtual parallel infrastructure. It also provides the ability to perform many more computations at once by modeling a parallel division of work between processes.