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Introduction

-Exchange of data between two or more separate, independent processes/threads.
-Operating systems provide facilities/resources for inter-process communications (IPC), such as message queues, semaphores, and shared memory.
-Distributed computing systems make use of these facilities/resources to provide application programming interface (API) which allows IPC to be programmed at a higher level of abstraction. (e.g., send and receive)
-Distributed computing requires information to be exchanged among independent processes.