Provides information about, access to, and common tools for GemFire distributed systems. When a program wishes to access distributed dtaa data stored in GemFire, it first creates a {@link org.apache.geode.distributed.DistributedSystem} that will connect to the distributed system. GemFire provides two means of discovering the other members in a distributed group. The first uses IP multicast to broadcast a message to all members that listen on a given port and address. The second method of discovery uses special VMs called {@linkplain org.apache.geode.distributed.Locator "locators"} to keep track of the members of the distributed system. Each locator is identified by a host/port pair that is specified when connecting to the distributed system.