A distributed system is one that uses networked computers to accomplish a common aim. Many computers are used to distribute the job. Distributed computing is the branch of computing that analyses distributed systems. The goal of distributed computing is to do tasks quickly by employing a large number of computers.

A distributed system in its most simplest definition is a group of computers working together as to appear as a single computer to the end-user.

What are the characteristics of Distributed System?

Openers: With improvements and extensions of distributed systems openers is concerned.

Resources sharing: The ability to use data, software and hardware anywhere in system is known as resource sharing.

Concurrency: In distributed systems concurrency occurs from separate activities of users, location of server processes in separate computers and independent of resources.

Transparency: The complexity of distributed systems to the application programs and users are hidden in transparency.

Fault tolerance: The systems reliability is looked under fault tolerance for circumstances of network, hardware and software.

Scalability: To accommodate more users and for improvement in corresponding responsiveness of system scalability is concerned to increase the number of processor in the system.