Research issues in "fully" distributed systems

The topic of distributed systems is a major research area at Georgia Institute of technology with the particular class of systems being examined described in a definational paper by Enslow [i]. In recent years, the phrase "distributed systems" has become an extremely popular term for both research and marketing and the meaning of the term has become very imprecise. For that reason, we at Georgia Tech have further identified our particular area of interest as fully distributed data processing systems. The major factor differentiating our work from that of others is that the systems we are examining are ~ ~ coupled. This is an important dxstinction to bear in mind while reading this paper, since our view of distributed systems is certainly quite different from other researchers as a result of assuming this characteristic.