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Lamport on writing "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System"

Turing Awardee Clips

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  • Presented by Leslie Lamport, Turing Award winner

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

23K views6 years ago1 recommendation

Distributed systemsHistory and cultureConsensus: Raft and PaxosHistory of computingPeople who shaped computing

Leslie Lamport discusses the connection between special relativity and his seminal paper on logical clocks in distributed systems.

Leslie Lamport, winner of the Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award, discuses his classic paper "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System." He explains the paper's connection to special relativity and his unusual approach of treating mutual exclusion as a physics problem. This clip is taken from an interview conducted with Lamport by Roy Levin for the ACM and Computer History Museum on August 12, 2016 in Mountain View, CA. Video of the full interview is available as part of Lamport’s ACM profile at amturing.acm.org/award_winners/lamport_1205376.cfm.

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What people say. Recommended as a fascinating look into how physics and special relativity inspired Lamport's breakthrough paper on logical clocks.

chatmastaon Hacker News • Recommends

The article itself isn't great, but it does briefly mention Leslie Lamport's 1978 paper "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distrib­uted System." In a 2016 interview, Lamport talked about his experience writing this paper and its association with special relativity. This short clip 0 from that interview is worth a watch. 0 link to this video
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LAC-Techon Hacker News • Mentions

On “A Gentle Introduction to CRDTs”

Even with terrestrial applications that have very low clock skew, it can be very helpful to have a notion of which events could be effected by previous events and which couldn't have. But you're bang on the money with the physics analogy. Lamport himself says that his knowledge of special relativity helped him come up with the concept. link to this video
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myk9001on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Vector Clocks: So what time is it?”

…lar, the four-dimensional space-time view developed by Minkowski in the famous 1908 paper. I realized that the problems in distributed systems are very much analogous to what's going on in physics ..." So, I don't know if these algorithms were reinvented or (re)discovered because, as you rightly say, they happen to operate in our universe. ^1: link to this video "…
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