Distributed computing : a distributed approach for an efficient digital infrastructure

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system.

From parallel to distributed computing

The fact that resources are provided by volunteers scattered around the world introduces a significant difference from the parallel computing you may be used to : in parallel computing, different threads of execution run at the same time and share a common memory that allows them to synchronize with each other.

In distributed computing, the nodes on which the computations are executed are remote, autonomous and do not share resources. Communication between the nodes is done by sending messages, within a cluster. On the one hand, this new computing model solves a number of problems, for example scaling is done horizontally, i.e., it is sufficient to add nodes to the cluster to increase its computing capacity. In the parallel model, we scale vertically, by increasing the power of the processors. But with the slowing down of Moore’s Law, this last model is being questioned.

Furthermore, the distributed model allows for greater fault tolerance : when a node in the cluster suffers a failure, it is sufficient to assign the task it was processing to another node, whereas in the…