Un système d'exploitation distribué est une couche logicielle au dessus d'un ensemble de nœuds de calculs indépendants, communiquant par un système de réseau propre ou général. Chaque nœud comprend dans ce type de système d'exploitation un sous ensemble de l’agrégat global. Chaque nœud comporte son propre noyau servant à contrôler le matériel et les couches basses des communications en réseau. Des logiciels de plus haut niveau sont chargés de coordonner les activités collaboratives de l'ensemble de la grappe et des éléments de chacun de ces nœuds.
Operating systems use lock managers to organise and serialise the access to resources. A distributed lock manager (DLM) runs in every machine in a cluster, with an identical copy of a cluster-wide lock database. In this way a DLM provides software applications which are distributed across a cluster on multiple machines with a means to synchronize their accesses to shared resources. DLMs have been used as the foundation for several successful s, in which the machines in a cluster can use each other's storage via a unified , with significant advantages for performance and availability.
A distributed transaction is a database transaction in which two or more network hosts are involved. Usually, hosts provide transactional resources, while the transaction manager is responsible for creating and managing a global transaction that encompasses all operations against such resources. Distributed transactions, as any other transactions, must have all four ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) properties, where atomicity guarantees all-or-nothing outcomes for the unit of work (operations bundle).
In transaction processing, databases, and computer networking, the two-phase commit protocol (2PC, tupac) is a type of atomic commitment protocol (ACP). It is a distributed algorithm that coordinates all the processes that participate in a distributed atomic transaction on whether to commit or abort (roll back) the transaction. This protocol (a specialised type of consensus protocol) achieves its goal even in many cases of temporary system failure (involving either process, network node, communication, etc.
Eventual consistency is a consistency model used in distributed computing to achieve high availability that informally guarantees that, if no new updates are made to a given data item, eventually all accesses to that item will return the last updated value. Eventual consistency, also called optimistic replication, is widely deployed in distributed systems and has origins in early mobile computing projects. A system that has achieved eventual consistency is often said to have converged, or achieved replica convergence.
