what is distributed system

2 min readApr 27, 2021

Distributed System

A distributed system is a collection of independent computers that appear to the users of the system as a single computer.

Example:1

Consider a network of workstations in a university or company department. In addition to each user’s personal workstation, there might be a pool of processors in the machine room that are not assigned to specific users but are allocated dynamically as needed. Such a system might have a single file system, with all files accessible from all machines in the same way and using the same path name. Furthermore, when a user typed a command, the system could look for the best place to execute that command, possibly on the user’s own workstation, possibly on an idle workstation belonging to someone else, and possibly on one of the unassigned processors in the machine room. If the system as a whole looked and acted like a classical single-processor timesharing system, it would qualify as a distributed system.

Some advantages of Distributed Systems are as follows −

All the nodes in the distributed system are connected to each other. So nodes can easily share data with other nodes.

More nodes can easily be added to the distributed system i.e. it can be scaled as required.