Distributed systems encompass many of the most significant technological developments of recent years and hence an understanding of the underlying technology is absolutely central to a knowledge of modern computing. The figure also provides an initial insight into the wide range of applications in use today, from relatively localized systems (as found, for example, in a car or aircraft) to global scale systems involving millions of nodes, from data-centric services to processor intensive tasks, from systems built from very small and relatively primitive sensors to those incorporating powerful computational elements, from embedded systems to ones that support a sophisticated interactive user experience, and so on
Top Example Of distributed systems
Web search
Web search has emerged as a major growth industry in the last decade, with recent figures indicating that the global number of searches has risen to over 10 billion per calendar month. The task of a web search engine is to index the entire contents of the World Wide Web, encompassing a wide range of information styles including web pages, multimedia sources and (scanned) books. This is a very complex task, as current estimates state that the Web consists of over 63 billion pages and one trillion unique web
The growth of eCommerce as exemplified by companies such as Amazon and eBay, and underlying payments technologies such as PayPal; the associated emergence of online banking and trading and also complex information dissemination systems for financial markets
The growth of the World Wide Web as a repository of information and knowledge; the development of web search engines such as Google and Yahoo to search this vast repository; the emergence of digital libraries and the large-scale digitization of legacy information sources such as books (for example, Google Books); the increasing significance of user-generated content through sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr; the emergence of social networking through services such as Facebook
Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs)
Massively multiplayer online games offer an immersive experience whereby very large numbers of users interact through the Internet with a persistent virtual world. Leading examples of such games include Sony’s Ever Quest II and EVE Online from the Finnish company CCP Games. Such worlds have increased significantly in sophistication and now include, complex playing arenas (for example EVE, Online consists of a universe with over 5,000 star systems) and multifarious social and economic systems. The number of players is also rising, with systems able to support over 50,000 simultaneous online players (and the total number of players perhaps ten times this figure)
Financial trading
Distributed systems support for financial trading markets. The financial industry has long been at the cutting edge of distributed systems technology with its need, in particular, for real-time access to a wide range of information sources (for example, current share prices and trends, economic and political developments). The industry employs automated monitoring and trading applications
