The second major category of service in a heterogeneous computing environment is distributed computing. Distributed computing refers to the concept of running an application or applications on remote node(s). Distributed computing is not the downloading of an application to be run locally. Such downloading is a service of the distributed file system. Distributed computing is the execution of an application on a remote server or servers with the results transmitted over the network to the client. Distributed computing takes four forms: login, remote execution, transaction processing, and cooperative processing.
Figure: Login (Client A) vs. Remote Execution (Client B).