Distributed Systems

The World Wide Web is used by millions of people everyday for various purposes including email, reading news, downloading music, online shopping or simply accessing information about anything. Using a standard web browser, the user can access information stored on Web servers situated anywhere on the globe. This gives the illusion that all this information is situated locally on the user�s computer. In reality, the Web represents a huge distributed system that appears as a single resource to the user available at the click of a button. �A collection of independent computers that appear to the users of the system as a single computer�. A common misconception among people when discussing distributed systems is that it is just another name for a network of computers. However, this overlooks an important distinction. A distributed system is built on top of a network and tries to hide the existence of multiple autonomous computers. It appears as a single entity providing the user with whatever services are required. There are various types of distributed systems, such as Clusters , Grids , P2P (Peer-to-Peer) networks , distributed storage systems and so on