Your computer is a distributed system

Re:Your computer is a distributed system by anyfoo on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @07:47PM (#30862216)

But in that case we accept the device as "broken" and need to replace or repair it. If you are lucky the PCB trace was only relevant to a single feature, say an LED. If you are unlucky, it's part of the memory bus and everything is toast. But no significant engineering went into making one more resilient than the other.

Whereas in a distributed system, a single broken communication line, even or especially if it's extremely important, still means that the distributed system has to recover somehow, preferably gracefully.

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Re:Your computer is a distributed system by charcircuit on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @08:10PM (#30862373)

Making things robust to failure is an engineering trade off. Your comment simply points out that there are cases where handling failures aren't seen as being important.

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Re:Your computer is a distributed system by harry8 on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @08:24PM (#30862453)

Clearly it's a trade off as everything always is. So you deal with probabilities of various kinds of failure in various circumstances.

Turning on a computer, compare the probability of an issue with the ethernet cable, ie not plugged in as suggested vs a pcb trace being broken. Given that probability do you want to handle one of those gracefully and not fry the machine? Both? Neither. And that's the point of identifying the difference. A thing that is rare and if it occurs everything is b0rked anyway doesn't need to be handled.

That individual components having to be robust on some level (what level? It depends...) to failure difference of distribution via a network connection and pcb traces is probably the reason we don't usually (but we might) refer to the latter as a distributed system.

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