Leslie Lamport

Summary

Leslie B. Lamport (born February 7, 1941 in Brooklyn) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual. Lamport was the winner of the 2013 Turing Award for imposing clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of distributed computing systems, in which several autonomous computers communicate with each other by passing messages. He devised important algorithms and developed formal modeling and verification protocols that improve the quality of real distributed systems. These contributions have resulted in improved correctness, performance, and reliability of computer systems. Early life and education Lamport was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Benjamin and Hannah Lamport (née Lasser). His father was an immigrant from Volkovisk in the Russian Empire (now Va

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In search of lost time

Martin Hutle

Dwork, Lynch, and Stockmeyer [3] and Lamport [4] showed that, in order to solve Consensus in a distributed system, it is sufficient that the system behaves well during a finite period of time. In sharp contrast, Chandra. Hadzilacos, and Toueg [6] proved that a failure detector that, from some time on, provides "good" information forever is necessary. We explain that this apparent paradox is due to the two-layered structure of the failure detector model. This structure also has impact on comparison relations between failure detectors. In particular, we make explicit why the classic relation is neither reflexive nor extends the natural history-wise inclusion. Our point is to help understanding existing models and to study how they model real distributed systems in an accurate way. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

2010

Improving Fast Paxos: being optimistic with no overhead

André Schiper

The paper addresses the cost of consensus algorithms. It has been shown that in the best case, consensus can be solved in two communication steps with f < n/2, and in one communication step with f < n/3 (f is the maximum number of faulty processes). This leads to a dilemma when choosing a consensus algorithm: greater efficiency or higher resiliency degree. Recently Lamport has proposed a solution called Fast Paxos, for partly escaping from this dilemma. The idea is to combine two types of rounds in a single consensus algorithm: fast rounds and rounds of the ordinary Paxos algorithm. In the best case, Fast Paxos solves consensus in one fast round, that is it requires only one communication step. Unfortunately, the combination induces some time overhead, and so Fast Paxos becomes more expensive than ordinary Paxos when fast rounds do not succeed. In this paper we go one step further: we show that it is possible to tentatively execute a fast round before a classical round without any time overhead if the fast round does not succeed.

2006