Distributed Algorithms for Message-Passing Systems

Distributed computing is at the heart of many applications. It arises as soon as one has to solve a problem in terms of entities -- such as processes, peers, processors, nodes, or agents --^ that individually have only a partial knowledge of the many input parameters associated with the problem. In particular each entity cooperating towards the common goal cannot have an instantaneous knowledge of the current state of the other entities. Whereas parallel computing is mainly concerned with 'efficiency', and real-time computing is mainly concerned with 'on-time computing', distributed computing…