What is the difference between a distributed system and distributed computing?

Question

I found out the following definitions of, respectively, distributed system and distributed computing:

Distributed system: a collection of independent computers that are connected with an interconnection network.

Distributed computing: a method of computer processing in which different parts of a computer program are run on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network.

However, it's not clear to me what the differences between the two are. What is the difference between a distributed system and distributed computing?

Answer 1

Distributed computing is a computing paradigm (defined as in your definition).

A distributed system is a collection of independent computers that are connected with an interconnection network.

Distributed systems are needed in order to make the distributed computing possible. In distributed computing, a program is divided into several tasks and run them on a distributed system.

Answer 2

According to my perspective, distributed computing is another very specific use of distributed systems.

Any network-based system can be seen as a distributed system, which exploits network to use remote components, opposed to the centralized or standalone systems.This includes any web application, email, gaming, etc. They comprise different components such as: client-side components, web servers, database servers, web services, etc.

Distributed computing is a very specific use of distributed systems, to split a large and complex processing into subparts and execute them in parallel in distributed components, to increase the productivity. For an example finding the prime numbers within a range, which can be split into smaller ranges and assign into different computers.

Answer 3

Parallel and Distributed Computing

Figure (a): is a schematic view of a typical distributed system; the system is represented as a network topology in which each node is a computer and each line connecting the nodes is a communication link.

Figure (b): shows the same distributed system in more detail: each computer has its own local memory, and information can be exchanged only by passing messages from one node to another by using the available communication links.

Figure (c): shows a parallel system in which each processor has a direct access to a shared memory.

reference links as well.

Answer 4

How about the SO tag definitions?

distributed-computing: Distributed computing is where multiple computing units are connected to achieve a common task. The larger computing power enables a lot more tasks to be performed than in a single unit, and searches can be coordinated for efficiency. Successes usually give the finder credit.

Distributed computing projects include hunting large prime number, and analysing DNA codes.

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distributed-system: A distributed system consists of a collection of autonomous computers, connected through a network and distribution middleware, which enables computers to coordinate their activities and to share the resources of the system, so that users perceive the system as a single, integrated computing facility.

I tend to think of distributed computing as more algorithm focused (like a submarine simulation) and distributed systems as more of a way to design systems for high availability and storing or processing big data (like an internet search engine).