Distributed Systems

The Part-Time Parliament

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments
The Part-Time Parliament - Lamport '90/'98 This is part 2 of a 10-part series on consensus. There's quite the back story to this paper. First submitted in 1990, researchers at the time didn't seem to take it seriously due to its presentation as an allegory, and failed to appreciate the fundamental contribution that we know ... Continue Reading

Viewstamped replication: A new primary copy method to support highly available distributed systems

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments
Viewstamped replication: A new primary copy method to support highly available distributed systems - Oki & Liskov '88. Given a set of co-operating nodes that form a group, how can we replicate information to group members and maintain a consistent "one copy serializability" property as group members come and go? Oki and Liskov introduce two ... Continue Reading

Broadcast disks: data management for asymmetric communication environments

~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment
Broadcast Disks: Data Management for Asymmetric Communication Environments - Acharya et al. 1997. (This is the fourth of Peter Alvaro's 'desert island paper' selections). Do you remember teletext? Before the web, this was the only on-demand information service for the general population. In the UK, we had the wonderful Ceefax. You would choose your page ... Continue Reading

Generative Communication in Linda

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Generative Communication in Linda - Gelernter 1985 This is the second of five papers selected by Peter Alvaro as part of his 'Desert Island papers' nominations. Generative communication is the basis of a new distributed programming language called Linda... Where most distributed languages are partially distributed in space and nondistributed in time, Linda is fully ... Continue Reading