Closely-Coupled Systems
A distributed system becomes more “closely coupled” as it:
- appears more uniform in nature
- runs a “single” operating system
- has a single security domain
- shares all logical resources (e.g., files)
- shares all physical resources (CPUs, memory, disks, printers, etc.)
In the limit, a distributed system looks to the user as if it were a centralized timesharing system, except that it’s constructed out of a distributed collection of hardware and software components.