Tag: distributed systems
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The FLP theorem: impossibility of achieving consensus within distributed systems
For this week, my distributed systems course just assigned us students a reading assignment: “Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process“. Apparently, this paper is a seminal piece of work that goes on to describe and prove that, given a single process failure within a distributed system, the underlying system cannot achieve consensus (i.e.…
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What are good models and what models are good?
Schneider, F. B. (1993). What good are models and what models are good. Distributed Systems, 2, 17–26. Paper Summary In his seminal paper on models (as they apply to distributed systems), Schnedier describes the two conventional ways — experimental observation; modeling and analysis — we normally develop an intuition when studying a new domain. And…
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Distributed Computing – Lesson 1 Summary
Summary Distributed systems are everywhere: social media, internet of things, single server systems — all part of larger, distributed systems. But how do you define a distributed system? A distributed system is, according to Leslie Lamport (father of distributed computing), a system in which failure of some component (or node) impacts the larger system, rendering…
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Distributed Systems Introduction notes
The main take away with the introduction to distributed systems lectures is that as system designers, we need to carefully inspect our program and identify what events in our system can run concurrently (as well as what cannot run concurrency or must be serialized). To this end, we need to identify what events must happen…