A Systematic Approach for Designing Distributed Computing Systems

Advances in the areas of computer networking and very large scale integration (VLSI) have led to an increased interest in distributed computing systems. A distributed computing system comprises of a collection of processing nodes and a communication network that interconnects these nodes, as is illustrated in figure 1. A processing node consists of one or more central processing units (a uniprocessor or a multiprocessor system with a shared memory or memory passing), memory, storage devices and a network interface unit.