[DamonHD]

As well as USENET that I mentioned elsewhere, a slightly less obvious set of distributed alogirthms are those that eg govern how small generators such as solar PV inverters sync to a grid, drop off if anything goes horribly wrong, ride through smaller bumps or fail to (which have caused sigificant upsets in the UK and Texas recently for example, so the algorithms/specs got tweaked). Indeed the workings of synchronous AC grids are huge realtime distributed systems, some literally steam powered, some software including AI and the financial markets, and the largest machines that we have. I spend way too much time tinkering at the edges of this sort of stuff, eg https://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-solar-DHW-for-16WW-UniQ-and...

[DamonHD]

Another is TCP congestion control including new variants such as BBR2 and relatives in QUIC:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/24/tcp_congestion_contro...

You can probably get to hack on some of that work!