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Distributed Algorithm for Constructing Minimal Spanning Trees in Networks (1976) [pdf]
- kick 7y agoHacker News's character limit is too short for the full, unminced title, which is: A Distributed Algorithm for Constructing Minimal Spanning Trees in Computer-Communication Networks I think it's worth sharing because (aside from the technical merits of the paper) it highlights how, despite the field not being that old, it has the memory of a rodent: a lot of the vocabulary found within is opaque without further inspection, even though a lot of problems described within are still relevant today.
- zzzcpan 7y agoWhat exactly did you find interesting in the paper? It's a pretty bad paper. The kind of paper you would expect from pre Lamport "distributed algorithms".
- yagibear 7y agoIt seems that that work didn't make much impact because it sat as a tech report and wasn't published until 1987, by which time Perlman had published her algorithm that received more exposure in SIGCOMM in 1985.
- commandersaki 7y agoInteresting I was wondering why.
- totorovirus 7y agowhy is spanning tree gaining so much interest recently?
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoNo idea. It is old as shit and equally annoying. There are many reasons why we (architects) minimize L2 domains - namely because we can achieve re-route / convergence quicker with other protocols, with STP being the long pole. Hell, containers are just L3-L3 forwarding in a lot of cases - no L2 domain, conceptually. TLDR: Spanning-Tree is the previous war. E-VPN + Modern L3 segmentation is the new way.