What the heck is a distributed platform, context, embedded systems?

Question

A bit of an academic question here

I'm reading about embedded systems and there's a lot of talk about distributed platforms. I'm looking for a definition of what is a distributed platform ,I have a vague semblance of it being when an embedded system controls multiple, disconnected parts, like, in a helicopter, it needs to control the tail rotor and top-side rotor, and measure acceleration and position etc.

Is this correct?

Time-triggered architecture is supposed to "offers synchronous execution on distributed platforms,"..

Answer 1

In my opinion, it is a group of computers on a network accomplishing a common task. The point of having several computers may be specialization or fault tolerance or both.

Maintaining a consistent global state is the main challenge of such architectures.

Answer 2

Since a picture is worth a thousand words...Here's an ugly ASCII view of distributed computing...

                   [ Client ]
                        +
                        |
                +-------|--------+              
                |                |              
 [ Client ]-----+  Central       +--------------+[ Client ]
                |    Computer    |
     [ Client ]-+                +------+[ Client ]
                +------|---------+
                       |
                       +
                  [ Client ]

Each client is in direct communication (be it messages, packets, data) over the wire/wireless/LAN/WAN communicating to the central computer. The central computer than performs the processing (For brevity of the ASCII art, I did not draw a database or anything like that) and a distributed Central Computer in that model could be interacting with the database in real-time or interacting with the hardware, again in real-time and feed the results to each of the clients.

A good example of a distributed computing model in simplistic, abstract terms is a web server such as IIS, Apache, in which each client is a browser, and you there would be n clients interacting with that web server, where n is the quantified number of computers connected up solely to view the web pages that the web server feeds out to each client.

Hope this helps, Best regards, Tom.