Date of Award

4-7-2004

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Mathematics

First Advisor

Dr. Douglas Szajda

Abstract

The Internet may be the single largest technological advance or significant societal change in the last century. Not only does it allow access to more information than any human could ever hope to digest, but it produces the potential of having millions of computers combining their computational forces for the betterment of a single cause .. Tl is is the fundamental goal of distributed computing. A distributed system is defined to be a network of machines with some degree of centralized direction. In a distributed computational system each machine will accept computational tasks from a supervisor in a master-slave relationship. Thus the compute power of many machines can be combined to solve difficult problems. A single user is potentially given the power of thousands of machines at his finger tips and the sum capability of the millions of computers whose processors sit idle much of the time is better utilized.

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