7.5. Special characteristics of distributed systems
The distinguishing characteristics of a distributed system may be summarized as follows:
Concurrency
The components of a distributed computation may run at the same time.
Independent failure modes
The components of a distributed computation and the network connecting them may fail independently of each other.
No global time
We assume that each component of the system has a local clock but the clocks might not record the same time. The hardware on which the clocks are based is not guaranteed to run at precisely the same rate on all components of the system, a feature called clock drift.
Communications delay
It takes time for the effects of an event at one point in a distributed system to propagate throughout ...
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