nick-newbe-I can't speak as a skilled programmer.. I have a financial model that would be perfect to run on a cluster of jos machines. A cluster that boots from a disk and can be automatically configured from a network. Build it and they will come.
Introduction Distributed computing has two definitions in the software industry. One has a wide scope, the other narrow. The power of distributed computing comes from thinking with wide scope, definition 1.
Definition 1. The first definition comes to use from structural engineering, where weight of a load can be distributed across a supporting structure. We translate "distribution of load" into the software domain. Distributing computing distributes the load of a program across two or more processes.
The distinction between parallel computing, network computing and distributed computing is this: distributed computing looks at inter-process communication; network computing looks at inter-computer communication, and parallel computing looks at inter-processor communication.
The distinction between client/server computing and distributed computing is this: distributed computing looks at all processes as transient, on-demand, and replaceable. Client/server computing looks at server-side processes as if they should run 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
A service is a software concept, while a server is a piece of hardware. One server may have many services. In TCP/IP terms, a "host" server has a NIC and runs the TCP/IP stack, while service software listens to a single "port".
Definition 2. One company, who shall remain nameless, thought they had "discovered" client/server computing in the late '80s, giving rise to the second definition of distributed computing. This company claimed to have invented a new way of looking distributing the load of SQL database services among two or more servers. In a narrow definition of distributed computing, something about SQL is always required. Many people know client/server and distributed computing only through SQL.
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