Distributed computing

Distributed computing is the process of running a single computational task on more than one distinct computer. This differs from cluster computing in that computers in a distributed computing environment are typically not dedicated to distributed computing, whereas clusters are almost always comprised of dedicated hardware. This makes distributed computing very attractive because it utilizes computational resources that would otherwise be unused.

Two popular non-profit distributed computing projects are distributed.net[1] and SETI@home[2]. United Devices[3] is the largest commercial distributed computing network.

Distributed computing is also an active area of research with abundant literature. The most known distributed computing conferences are The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks [4] and the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing [5]. Journals include the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing [6].