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

  • Authors:
  • Leslie Lamport

  • Affiliations:
  • Massachusetts Computer Associates, Inc.

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1978

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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.