In any introductory lecture on distributed systems, the concept of synchronization of physical clocks are discussed before moving onto logical clocks.
Many protocols are discussed under this topic like Christian's algorithm, Berkeley algorithm, NTP etc. I have a question here. From what I understand, distributed applications are nothing more than applications running over a distributed middleware which in turn run over a normal operating system.
Now, if distributed applications are able to change physical clocks in these algorithm, does that mean an application level process has access to CPU clock and can change it? How does it affect the other processes running on the system?