

Distributed Vs. Fault Tolerant Systems - bnmrrs
http://stu.mp/2009/12/distributed-vs-fault-tolerant-systems.html

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evgen
Stump's three criteria for a distributed system has a partial-truth in it that
might confuse people (and perhaps he himself is confused.) A distributed
system can work just fine if there is a master, as long as the system does not
rely upon that node always remaining the master and/or has no way to elect a
new master if the old master can no longer connect to a quorum of the nodes in
the system. Whenever you see nodes described as the "master" this is usually a
strong indicator that the system is not really a distributed system, but you
have to dig a bit deeper to make sure.

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pashields
"Distributed systems" is not a new term. Please don't use it as though it only
applies to systems designed to distribute data (ala NoSQL). Distributed
computing has classically been focused on the use of network nodes for both
data storage and computation. See: MPI, Linda, etc.

