Distributed Computing

The terms "concurrent computing", "parallel computing", and "distributed computing" have a lot of overlap, and no clear distinction exists between them.

In the case of distributed computing projects such as SETI@home and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, while the bulk of the operations occur on the client side, the servers are responsible for coordinating the clients, sending them data to analyze, receiving and storing results, providing reporting functionality to project administrators, etc.

Client-server computing refers broadly to any distributed application that distinguishes between service providers (servers) and service requestors (clients).

In industry the cyber-physical systems empowered by Cloud technologies have led to novel approaches that paved the path to Industry 4.0.

Autonomic computing (AC) is distributed computing resources with self-managing characteristics, adapting to unpredictable changes while hiding intrinsic complexity to operators and users.

Blockchains are typically managed by a peer-to-peer (P2P) computer network for use as a public distributed ledger, where nodes collectively adhere to a consensus algorithm protocol to add and validate new transaction blocks.

Grids are a form of distributed computing composed of many networked loosely coupled computers acting together to perform large tasks.

SOA can be seen as part of the continuum which ranges from the older concept of distributed computing and modular programming, through SOA, and on to practices of mashups, SaaS, and cloud computing (which some see as the offspring of SOA).

Ubiquitous computing themes include: distributed computing, mobile computing, location computing, mobile networking, sensor networks, human-computer interaction, context-aware smart home technologies, and artificial intelligence.

He was a distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was known for his work in fault-tolerant computing.

He was named an IEEE Fellow in 1994 for contributions to fault-tolerant, real-time systems.

He is known for his contributions to the field of real-time fault-tolerant systems.

Volunteer computing

The Lamport timestamp algorithm is a simple logical clock algorithm used to determine the order of events in a distributed computer system.

The Chandy-Lamport algorithm is a snapshot algorithm that is used in distributed systems for recording a consistent global state of an asynchronous system.

Raft offers a generic way to distribute a state machine across a cluster of computing systems

The Dijkstra-Scholten algorithm (named after Edsger W. Dijkstra and Carel S. Scholten) is an algorithm for detecting termination in a distributed system.

Lamport's Distributed Mutual Exclusion Algorithm is a contention-based algorithm for mutual exclusion on a distributed system.

the bully algorithm is a method for dynamically electing a coordinator or leader from a group of distributed computer processes

Large Scale Distributed Systems

is an agreement algorithm used to select sources for estimating accurate time from a number of noisy time sources.

The intersection algorithm is an agreement algorithm used to select sources for estimating accurate time from a number of noisy time sources.

The Ricart-Agrawala algorithm is an algorithm for mutual exclusion on a distributed system.

Schahram Dustdar is an Austrian computer scientist known for his work on distributed systems and elastic computing.

Contribution to BSD Unix and implementing virtual memory support; Fault-tolerant distributed computing; Biology and nature-inspired computing.

He was awarded the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award in 2024, and named as an ACM Fellow in 2025, "for contributions to parallel/distributed computing, resilience, and scientific data reduction" and IEEE Fellow, class of 2017 "for contributions to high-performance computing, fault tolerance, and grid-based computing".

Opportunities and Perils in Data Science Google's Hybrid Approach to Research CS+X Research on Reliable Distributed Computing Andrew File System (AFS)

In computing, Memcached (pronounced either /mɛmkæʃˈdiː/ mem-cash-DEE ["dee/d" being for daemon], or /ˈmɛmkæʃt/ MEM-cashed) is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system.

OpenSSI is an open-source single-system image clustering system.

His research focuses on distributed systems and dependability.

Ali Ghodsi (born 1978) is an Iranian-Swedish-American computer scientist and entrepreneur, specializing in distributed systems, big data and data management.

Herlihy has contributed to areas including theoretical foundations of wait-free synchronization, linearizable data structures, applications of combinatorial topology to distributed computing, as well as hardware and software transactional memory.

Ion Stoica (born 1964 or 1965) is a Romanian-American computer scientist specializing in distributed systems, cloud computing and computer networking.

He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group.