Turing Award Goes To Distributed Computing Wrangler Leslie Lamport 40
alphadogg writes "Leslie Lamport, a Microsoft Research principal, has been named the winner of the 2013 ACM A.M. Turing Award, frequently called the 'Nobel Prize in Computing.' The computer scientist was recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery 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.' His algorithms, models and verification systems have enabled distributed computer systems to play the key roles they're used in throughout the data center, security and cloud computing landscapes."
Re:Does that mean Microsoft Network is better ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also he built a huge portion of LaTeX, and wrote the most important book on the topic.
Finally, people who go to Microsoft Research tend to disappear and never be heard of again. No one knows why.
intrigued and annoyed (Score:5, Informative)
Your comment got me reading his work. As a time geek who has been going around bitching about wildly out-of-sync clocks in clusters and other tightly coupled networks, his ideas interest me.
For anyone else who is mildly curious, here's a very short summary of his key idea, as I understand it from a brief reading:
In a cluster, you sometimes need to know which of two events should be considered "first". For example, if one process writes some state data and another process reads it, you need to know whether the read comes first and should get the old value, or if the write comes first, so the read gets the new value.
System clocks aren't perfectly synchronized. With multi-Ghz processors, events can happen so fast that the system timestamp isn't accurate or precise enough to identify which request was sent first.
To solve the problem of knowing which request is considered first, you can use a counter. Each request includes it's counter value - request #1, request #2, etc. If the receiving system keeps track of the highest counter and overwrites any "past" values with its own current "now" counter, it can put requests into a defined order.
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It really is brilliant and surprisingly accessible. You don't need to be a rocket surgeon to understand it, but it conveys some truly awesome ideas.
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Also, it's spelled dafuq.
Re:Does that mean Microsoft Network is better ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally, people who go to Microsoft Research tend to disappear and never be heard of again. No one knows why.
That's only true if you never go to any computer science conferences: if you do, you'll find a lot of good papers written by MSR people. They do, however, have an appalling track record of turning them into products. This has improved a bit over the past few years, but until then MS and MSR were effectively run as two different companies and ideas from MSR were unlikely to be exploited in MS products.
The cynical explanation is that MSR exists to provide talented people with a well-funded sandbox where they will play and not create companies that compete with MS. The more likely explanation is that MSR has a budget of around $5bn annually, has separate premises, and does not provide any incentive to its employees to get their work into products.
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More likely, the computer scientists cannot get their ideas past the marketdroids that run MS.
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And I think that's the right approach. Judging the success of research based on how many product ideas they turn out will result in misguided research. It is a failure of the MPs on the product teams for ignoring what MSR is doing. That does seem to be changing but it used to be very bad.
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This depends on a number of factors. Did Microsoft use the designs he came up with when he did this work? Was Linux not allowed to use these designs? Did he (or someone else) find a way to improve upon that work, and were these improvements incorporated into Windows (or Linux)?
Even a rockstar can be hobbled by bad management, and we all know that the quality of Microsoft's management has, at times, been questionable. It's entirely possible that this could have happened here. Or maybe it didn't. We can't be
And a million heads asploded. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft guy wins turing award. Nerds snicker and claim bribery.
Nerds referred to LaTex, which he wrote. Heads asplode.
Re:And a million heads asploded. (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft guy wins turing award. Nerds snicker and claim bribery.
Nerds referred to LaTex, which he wrote. Heads asplode.
He also wrote numerous papers that provide the foundations for much of the sophisticated distributed computing infrastructure we have today. For example, he created the Paxos algorithm, which describes an effective and fairly efficient approach for achieving a consensus view of shared state among a network of distributed processes. The concepts from Paxos -- and AFAIK the actual algorithm family -- is the technology underlying all of the massively-scalable distributed databases. It provides the mechanism for achieving eventual consistency while not stopping the world to synchronize.
In particular, huge chunks of fundamental system architecture at Google are based on Paxos. Not all NoSQL data stores take this approach, but all that don't have some fundamental limitations on scalability because without a distributed consensus protocol they have to introduce bottlenecks.
Of course, I think most of his really influential work was done before he went to Microsoft.
Well-merited (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus (Score:3, Insightful)
He wrote a good typesetting system, to bad he could not convince Microsoft to use it.
Re: Plus (Score:2, Informative)
Woah, there. He wrote a good layer over a good typesetting system. Awesome as LaTeX is, please don't gloss over the separate awesemess of TeX.
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Wrong problem identification (Score:2)
I'm not sure why you care if *Microsoft* uses (La)Tex. This is a choice for the *customers*, and given that (La)Tex has always been easily and freely available for everyone I'm not sure what mindset you have to blame Microsoft. Because you don't dare insult *everyone* at once (the overwhelming customer majority), because then everyone reading your comment would have seen the lack of thinking that went into it? So you instead gained some "Insightful" votes from equally zealous MS haters, congrats, well done
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You mean Knuth wrote a good typesetting system and Lamport make it easier to use for many of the common things it was being used for, i.e., writing technical papers.
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Leslie Nielsen would like to have a word with you.
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Leslie Nielsen would like to have a word with you.
Surely you can't be serious!
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Lamport did the Bakery Algorithm for thead sync (Score:2)
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supercilious bastress (Score:5, Interesting)
The man deserves it. He rocks. I've loved the precision of his engagement with fundamental assumptions since my first encounter with the Baker's algorithm.
My Writings [microsoft.com] is a good time killer. One of my favorite passages is this one:
They did a fair amount of work together, judging by all the other places her name appears.
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The only thing that surprised me is that he did not already have won that award.
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Lamport's Law (Score:2)
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."
FIRST POST (Score:2)
my request counter is 0!
Welcome to Lamport's Bakery! (Score:1)
My first encounter with Leslie's work was Lamport's Bakery. It's a serialization primitive with some surprising properties. For example, it doesn't require properly arbitrated access to memory as the initial value read from memory on entrance to the "bakery" actually doesn't matter!
Dr. Lamport was actually kind enough to reply to an email of mine regarding said primitive. I was optimizing a version of it for a multiprocessor device we were making where I work, and I had come upon what I thought was a cle
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Ok, the statement I made in my third sentence above is imprecise to the point of being inaccurate. The exact property, as described by Wikipedia:
So the part about not needing "properly arbitrated memory access" is mostly tru