Computer Science Stack Exchange
Computer Science Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [distributed-systems]

Questions about the challenges of solving problems with multiple cooperating but separate agents.

414 questions
73
votes
4 answers

What is the novelty in MapReduce?

A few years ago, MapReduce was hailed as revolution of distributed programming. There have also been critics but by and large there was an enthusiastic hype. It even got patented! [1] The name is reminiscent of map and reduce in functional…
Raphael
  • 73,212
  • 30
  • 182
  • 400
66
votes
8 answers

Distributed vs parallel computing

I often hear people talking about parallel computing and distributed computing, but I'm under the impression that there is no clear boundary between the 2, and people tend to confuse that pretty easily, while I believe it is very…
Charles Menguy
  • 1,193
  • 1
  • 10
  • 12
41
votes
6 answers

Clock synchronization in a network with asymmetric delays

Assume a computer has a precise clock which is not initialized. That is, the time on the computer's clock is the real time plus some constant offset. The computer has a network connection and we want to use that connection to determine the constant…
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
  • 44,159
  • 8
  • 120
  • 184
33
votes
2 answers

How do Functional Reactive Programming and the Actor model relate to each other?

FRP is about streaming events and behaviours through pure functions. The Actor model - at least, as implemented in Akka - is about streaming immutable messages (which can be considered to be discrete events) through potentially impure objects,…
Robin Green
  • 703
  • 2
  • 7
  • 11
27
votes
7 answers

Start learning about Theory of Distributed Systems?

What's the best way that anyone can do to have a good introduction to the theory of distributed system, any books or references, and topics should be covered first and requirements to start learning in this topic.
Sameh K. Mohamed
  • 381
  • 1
  • 4
  • 6
24
votes
1 answer

How Does Populating Pastry's Routing Table Work?

I'm trying to implement the Pastry Distributed Hash Table, but some things are escaping my understanding. I was hoping someone could clarify. Disclaimer: I'm not a computer science student. I've taken precisely two computer science courses in my…
Paddy
  • 343
  • 2
  • 5
21
votes
1 answer

distributed alpha beta pruning

I am looking for an efficient algorithm that lets me process the minimax search tree for chess with alpha-beta pruning on a distributed architecture. The algorithms I have found (PVS, YBWC, DTS see below) are all quite old (1990 being the latest). I…
wirate
  • 311
  • 1
  • 4
21
votes
4 answers

Measuring one way network latency

This is a puzzle about measuring network latency that I created. I believe the solution is that it's impossible, but friends disagree. I'm looking for convincing explanations either way. (Though it is posed as a puzzle I think it fits on this web…
Craig Gidney
  • 5,992
  • 1
  • 26
  • 51
17
votes
5 answers

External consistency vs linearizability

In Spanner, TrueTime & The CAP Theorem, Eric Brewer writes: One subtle thing about Spanner is that it gets serializability from locks, but it gets external consistency (similar to linearizability) from TrueTime [emphasis added]. What is the…
Lorin Hochstein
  • 281
  • 2
  • 8
15
votes
1 answer

All soldiers should shoot at the same time

When I was a student, I saw a problem in a digital systems/logic design textbook, about N soldiers standing in a row, and want to shoot at the same time. A more difficult version of the problem was that the soldiers stand in a general network…
Erel Segal-Halevi
  • 6,088
  • 1
  • 25
  • 60
15
votes
1 answer

Who are the legislators of Paxos?

In the seminal distributed systems paper The Part Time Parliament (the Paxos protocol), Leslie Lamport names fictional legislators who are involved in the Paxon parliament protocol. According to this writing, he notes that: I gave the Greek…
Jon Bringhurst
  • 253
  • 1
  • 6
14
votes
3 answers

What is the origin of the client server model?

I was wondering if someone knew the origin of the client server model. Where does the term come from (paper, software application, book)?
marcmagransdeabril
  • 253
  • 2
  • 8
13
votes
2 answers

Difference between Lamport timestamps and Vector clocks

Lamport timestamps and vector clocks sound like almost the same thing. Both are used to determine the order of events in a distributed system. What are their key differences?
bkoodaa
  • 377
  • 2
  • 3
  • 13
11
votes
3 answers

Happened-before and Causal order

I'm reading Lamport's "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" and there's a detail that's bugging me. Lamport defines the "happened before" partial order, which I understand. Then he says that "Another way of viewing the…
Nemo
  • 365
  • 2
  • 8
10
votes
1 answer

Can the end-to-end principle be formalized?

In the late 1990s, when I was in graduate school, the paper JH Saltzer; DP Reed; DD Clark: End-to-end arguments in system design. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 2(4):277-288, 1984. DOI=10.1145/357401.357402 was pretty much required reading in every…
Wandering Logic
  • 17,863
  • 1
  • 46
  • 87
1
2 3
…
27 28