Century papers at the first quarter-century milestone

• Authors: Danny Dolev
• Venue: Proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
• Year: 2006

My talk intends to look back at the first 25 years of PODC to surface issues regarding its potential impact in light of the extensive spread out of Distributed Computing. Distributed computing expands to a level that no one anticipated even few years ago. In the near future distributed computing will be part of every aspect of our life -- from monitoring personal health to environment tracking, from communication to commuting and will be applied from within a chip through a multi-cpu machine to a virtual globally spanned machine. Society will be completely depended on the ability to continuously provide services at one level or another. The various systems will interact and will never be in a steady state. Are we ready to address such issues? Is the tool-box PODC have developed over the last quarter century will help the community to address the challenges of such systems.When PODC was founded there were skeptics that did not view Distributed Computing as a viable field of Computer Science. Few pioneers envisioned the role it will play and decided that it is an identified discipline with specific focus of interest that will benefit from having a separate conference.An impact is a multi facet notion and there is no single scale to measure it. In the talk I will discuss the impact of PODC from several angles. PODC went through several cycles over the years, from the first very few embryonic years, through a period of stability, some hard years and the emerging focus over the last few years.To get an independent perspective I chose to also look at PODC through the eyes of Google Scholar. I listed regular papers that have at least 100 references to the PODC version and to the subsequent paper in a journal (when I noticed one). The compiled list was different than any list I would have compiled myself1. In the talk I will discuss the list presented in the bibliography and will explore various objective measures that are reflected by it. I will compare it to various other topics and will try to raise issues that the PODC community needs to discuss toward its future role in the continuously expanding Distributed Computing discipline.I will also comment on various emerging fields in which Distributed Computing will play a major role and will point out challenges that the main-stream research in PODC is not capable of addressing.