Why use distributed systems?
Distributed systems are now a requirement:
- economics dictate that we buy small computers
- everyone needs to communicate
- we need to share physical devices (printers) as well as information (files, etc.)
- many applications are by their nature distributed (bank teller machines, airline reservations, ticket purchasing)
- in the future, to solve the largest problems, we will need to get large collections of small machines to cooperate together (parallel programming)