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There is no distributed system without Lamport. His Time, Clocks and Ordering paper to distributed system is like Ted Codd’s A Relational Model paper to databas
by uvdn7 4y ago
There is no distributed system without Lamport. His Time, Clocks and Ordering paper to distributed system is like Ted Codd’s A Relational Model paper to database (which is also math!). His elegant analogy between the special relativity, space-time diagram, reasoning distributed systems as state machines, and TLA+; each one is breathtaking.
Paxos is so beautiful. It’s a piece of art. It’s way more elegant and beautiful than Raft (as it solves the smallest consensus problem instead of a log). I will die on this hill.
- fizwhiz 4y agoTIL Edgar Codd went by Ted.
- frogulis 4y agoI don't think I'd even heard his name without the "F." initial in the middle either.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoI have that paper printed out on my desk :) Won't pretend I understand it 100% but it taught me a lot about distributed systems.
- butterisgood 4y agoViewstamped Replication (the other VR), is also very lovely. https://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/vr-revisited.pdf https://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/vr-revisited.pdf
- adolph 4y agoThe TLA+ Lectures are awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p54W-XOIEF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p54W-XOIEF8 [suddenly in a clown costume] "What kind of clown am I, claiming I can make you think better? Why should you pay attention to me?" [in a suit] "This is not the time to be modest. I have done seminal research in the theory of concurrent and distributed systems for which I won the Turing award. You can stop the video now and look me up on the web." [long pause]
- gralx 4y agoEaster egg: at one point you can hear him typing on an IBM buckling spring keyboard. Something for the keyboard enthusiasts :)
- _benedict 4y agoI think you maybe overstate it, but I agree Paxos is nicer than Raft. The papers in which we outlines it are awful though. Raft is more understandable, because they wrote a paper that was easy to understand. You are much better off reading Heidi Howard to understand Paxos, than Lamport.
- gralx 4y agoLamport's early Paxos papers are interesting for a lot of reasons (I particularly like his simple textbook definition of equivalence classes in "Generalized Consensus and Paxos" (2005)), but I agree that the Paxos algorithm gets lost in all the fluff. In 2016 some researchers at Stony Brook published the full (Multi-) Paxos algorithm using TLA+, including a couple of nice extras: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01387 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01387 The spec is succinct enough to commit to memory and way easier to comprehend than Lamport's prose descriptions (Lamport has never specified the Paxos algorithm in TLA+, although you can find his TLA+ spec for Paxos consensus). The paper also includes a mechanically checked proof and an interesting overview of other related work.