Definition

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PC Magazine.com Encyclopedia

 

(1) The use of multiple computers networked throughout a wide geographical area, or the world via the Internet, in order to solve a single problem. See grid computing.

 

(2) The use of multiple computers in an enterprise rather than one centralized system. This use of the term was coined in the late 1970s when minicomputers were first installed in departments throughout a company instead of deploying terminals to a mainframe.

 

 

Webopedia

 

A type of computing in which different components and objects comprising an application can be located on different computers connected to a network. So, for example, a word processing application might consist of an editor component on one computer, a spell-checker object on a second computer, and a thesaurus on a third computer. In some distributed computing systems, each of the three computers could even be running a different operating system.

 

 

 

One of the requirements of distributed computing is a set of standards that specify how objects communicate with one another. There are currently two chief distributed computing standards: CORBA and DCOM.

 

 

 

 http://youtube.com/watch?v=PUPLimoTtiY

This is a YouTube clip of Dr. Vijay Ponde explaining a distributed computing program called Folding at Home.  The first minute explains why he and Stanford researchers are studying protein folding and misfolding.  The last 30 seconds of the video explains how distributed computing makes studying protein folding possible, and how researchers can then study disease caused by protein misfolding.

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