Dr. Dobb's | 2007 Dijkstra Prize Awarded

2007 Dijkstra Prize Awarded

The 2007 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing Goes to "Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony''

August 13, 2007
URL:http://drdobbs.com/2007-dijkstra-prize-awarded/201500133

"Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony'' by Cynthia Dwork, Nancy Lynch, and Larry Stockmeyer, which appeared in the Journal of the ACM, (vol. 35, no. 2, April, 1988) has been awarded the Dijkstra Prize at the Twenty-Sixth Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2007), in Portland, Oregon.

According to the prize committee, this "paper introduced a number of practically motivated partial synchrony models that lie between the completely synchronous and the completely asynchronous models, and in which consensus is solvable. It gave practitioners the right tool for building fault tolerant systems, and contributed to the understanding that safety can be maintained at all times, despite the impossibility of consensus and progress is facilitated during periods of stability. These are the pillars on which every fault tolerant system has been built for two decades. This includes academic projects such as Petal, Frangipani, and Boxwood, as well as real life data centers, such as the Google filesystem."

The publication by Dwork, Lynch, and Stockmeyer (who was honored posthumously), was hailed as being "in many respects, the first to suggest a path through this thicketIt presents consensus algorithms for a number of partial synchrony models with different timing requirements and failure assumptions: crash, authenticated Byzantine, and Byzantine failures. It also proves tight lower bounds on the resilience of such algorithmsThe eventual synchrony approach introduced in this paper is used to model algorithms that provide safety at all times, even in completely asynchronous runs, and guarantee liveness once the system stabilizes," according to the prize committee, which was comprised of Hagit Attiya, Dahlia Malkhi, Keith Marzullo, Marios Mavronicolas, and Andrzej Pelc, and chaired by Roger Wattenhofer.

The prize is awarded annually to a paper on the principles of distributed computing, the significance and impact of which on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at least a decade. Past prizes have gone to John M. Mellor-Crummey and Michael L. Scott for "Algorithms for Scalable Synchronization on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors" in 2006; Marshal Pease , Robert Shostak, and Leslie Lamport for "Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults" in 2005; R.G. Gallager , P.A. Humblet, and P.M. Spira for "A Distributed Algorithm for Minimum-Weight Spanning Trees" in 2004; Maurice Herlihy for "Wait-Free Synchronization" in 2003; and prize namesake Edsger W. Dijkstra for "Self-Stabilizing Systems in Spite of Distributed Control" in 2002.