Distributed operating system

A distributed operating system is system software running across a collection of independent, networked, communicating, and physically separate computational nodes that together service jobs handled by multiple CPUs. Each node runs its own subset of the global operating system, made up of a minimal microkernel that directly controls the hardware of that node together with a higher level set of system management components that coordinate the individual and collaborative activities of the node. When the microkernel and management components work together to integrate the many resources and processing functions of the system into an efficient, stable whole, the result is called transparency or a single system image, the illusion that the entire distributed system appears to users as one computational entity. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/