A landmark 1982 paper on these systems analogizes their source congruency issues to a group of Byzantine generals who may independently decide whether to attack or treat. The Paxos family of protocols, as well as the Chandra-Toueg algorithm, tries to solve consistency in these systems through pinging. Generally, these systems should feature "graceful degradation" by being 
A landmark 1982 paper on these systems analogizes their source congruency issues to a group of Byzantine generals who may independently decide whether to attack or treat. The Paxos family of protocols, as well as the Chandra-Toueg algorithm, tries to solve consistency in these systems through pinging. Generally, these systems should feature "graceful degradation" by being fault-tolerant. As opposed to Cristian's algorithm, the Berkeley algorithm works on these systems by factoring in the "round trip time" and then averaging the elements of a "clock vector." Both of those procedures attempt to solve the asynchronous time issue of these systems. These systems communicate by passing messages on a network, and popular examples of software that runs on these systems include SETI@home and Folding@home. For 10 points, name these systems of autonomous computers that are tied to the same network.