Basic Abstractions

Abstract

Applications that are deployed in practical distributed systems usually execute on a myriad of different machines and communication infrastructures. Physical machines differ in the number of processors, type of processors, amount and speed of both volatile and persistent memory, and so on. Communication infrastructures differ in parameters such as latency, throughput, reliability, etc. On top of these machines and infrastructures, a huge variety of software components are sometimes needed to support one application: operating systems, file systems, middleware, communication protocols, with each component having its own specific features.