Most distributed consensus algorithms, or distributed systems in general, are not resilient to nodes producing arbitrary wrong results. That's the realm of systems like Bitcoin, which achieve such resilience by paying big performance costs.
So it shouldn't be surprising that computers have the same lack of resilience.
Re:Your computer is a distributed system
by anonymousDan on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @06:47PM
(#30861795)
Sorry what? That is exactly the purpose of Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithms, which have been around for many years.
Sure, that doesn't contradict what I said. They have been around for years, and they are very expensive and almost all systems do not use them.
Re:Your computer is a distributed system
by anonymousDan on Thursday March 31, 2022 @06:09PM
(#30872765)
They are a lot more efficient than bitcoin. But agreed, not cheap.
Re:Your computer is a distributed system
by StillBored on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @02:07PM
(#30858701)
The tandems I listed above, originally used lock stepped processors, along with stratus/etc.
edit: Googling yields few results that aren't actual books, Try this
https://books.google.com/books?id=wBuy0oLXEuQC&pg=PA218&lpg=...
Re:Your computer is a distributed system
by dwohnitmok on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @05:46PM
(#30861213)
Ah well there you go. Had no idea they used lock stepping!
I agree with parent. The major reason why programming on a single computer is easier than a distributed system is that we assume total resilience of various components that we cannot for a distributed system.
From the article:
> This offers hope that it is possible to some day abstract away the distributed nature of larger-scale systems.
To do this is not a question of software abstractions, but hardware resilience. If we have a network which we can reasonably assume to have 100% uptime and absolutely no corruption between all its components then we can program distributed systems as single computers.