ACM SIGACT news distributed computing column 5

ABSTRACT

The Distributed Computing Column covers the theory of systems that are composed of a number of interacting computing elements. These include problems of communication and networking, databases, distributed shared memory, multiprocessor architectures, operating systems, verification internet, and the web.This issue consists of four parts:• a survey of SIROCCO'01 by Pierre Fraigniaud,• a survey of POMC'01 by Rui Fan,• a survey of PODC'01 by myself,• the paper "Paxos Made Simple" by Leslie Lamport.This year was the 20-th anniversary of PODC, and included a special celebration honoring the work of Leslie Lamport, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, and was collocated with the Workshop on Principles of Mobile Computing (POMC). I briefly describe the PODC conference, and reproduce the toast by Fred Schneider in the honor of Leslie. The Business Meeting report is by Gil Neiger. Finally, there is Leslie's paper on his own algorithm which was discussed in a few of the PODC lectures. I am very grateful to the many people contributing to this issue.

REFERENCES

• 1: Michael J. Fischer , Nancy A. Lynch , Michael S. Paterson, Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process, Journal of the ACM (JACM), v.32 n.2, p.374-382, April 1985 [doi>10.1145/3149.214121]
• 2: Idit Keidar , Sergio Rajsbaum, On the cost of fault-tolerant consensus when there are no faults: preliminary version, ACM SIGACT News, v.32 n.2, June 2001 [doi>10.1145/504192.504195]
• 3: Leslie Lamport. The implementation of reliable distributed multiprocess systems. Computer Networks, 2:95-114, 1978.
• 4: Leslie Lamport, Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system, Communications of the ACM, v.21 n.7, p.558-565, July 1978 [doi>10.1145/359545.359563]
• 5: Leslie Lamport, The part-time parliament, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.16 n.2, p.133-169, May 1998 [doi>10.1145/279227.279229]