Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system

The work

AuthorsLeslie Lamport
Editors
Typearticle
Year1978
Citekeylamport1978time

Where it appeared

Published inCommunications of the ACM
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Volume21
Issue7
Pages558--565

Identifiers

DOI10.1145/359545.359563
OpenAlexW3137220996

Access

Landing pagehttps://doi.org/10.1145/359545.359563
Free full texthttps://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/359545.359563

Abstract

The concept of one event happening before another in a distributed system is examined, and is shown to define a partial ordering of the events. A distributed algorithm is given for synchronizing a system of logical clocks which can be used to totally order the events. The use of the total ordering is illustrated with a method for solving synchronization problems. The algorithm is then specialized for synchronizing physical clocks, and a bound is derived on how far out of synchrony the clocks can become.

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Filed under

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Cite it as

@article{lamport1978time,
  title        = {Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system},
  author       = {Leslie Lamport},
  year         = {1978},
  journal      = {Communications of the ACM},
  publisher    = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  volume       = {21},
  number       = {7},
  pages        = {558--565},
  doi          = {10.1145/359545.359563},
}

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