Distributed System Nodes
If the network in question is a distributed system, the nodes are clients, servers or peers. A peer may sometimes serve as client, sometimes server. In a peer-to-peer or overlay network, nodes that actively route data for the other networked devices as well as themselves are called supernodes.
Distributed systems may sometimes use virtual nodes so that the system is not oblivious to the heterogeneity of the nodes. This issue is addressed with special algorithms, like consistent hashing, as it is the case in Amazon's.
Read more about this topic: Node (networking)
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