Concepts inUnreliable failure detectors for reliable distributed systems

Distributed computing

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal. A computer program that runs in a distributed system is called a distributed program, and distributed programming is the process of writing such programs.  more from Wikipedia

Consensus (computer science)

A fundamental problem in distributed computing is to achieve overall system reliability in the presence of a number of faulty processes. This often requires processes to agree on some data value that is needed during computation. Examples of applications of consensus include whether to commit a transaction to a database, agreeing on the identity of a leader, state machine replication, and atomic broadcasts.  more from Wikipedia

Asynchronous system

In a synchronous system, operations are coordinated under the centralized control of a fixed-rate clock signal or several clocks. An asynchronous digital system, in contrast, has no global clock: instead, it operates under distributed control, with concurrent hardware components communicating and synchronizing on channels.  more from Wikipedia

Failure detector

In distributed computing, a failure detector is an application or a subsystem that is responsible for detection of node failures or crashes in a distributed system.  more from Wikipedia

Process (computing)

In computing, a process is an instance of a computer program that is being executed. It contains the program code and its current activity. Depending on the operating system (OS), a process may be made up of multiple threads of execution that execute instructions concurrently. A computer program is a passive collection of instructions; a process is the actual execution of those instructions.  more from Wikipedia