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Turing Award Goes To Distributed Computing Wrangler Leslie Lamport
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."
Microsoft guy wins turing award. Nerds snicker and claim bribery.
Nerds referred to LaTex, which he wrote. Heads asplode.
The work he did was back in the 80s. From my recollection, he applied relativity equations to distributed computing. He realized that you didn't need to try to synchronize perfectly all your clocks; that is, the same event might happen at different times from the perspective of different computers. If I remember correctly, he said when he showed his equations to his coworkers the equations they treated him like he was Moses, coming down from the mountain with tablets of stone; but to him it seemed like kind of an obvious solution.
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Lamport wrote the paper "Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in Distributed Systems", one of the papers that stayed with me and influenced me most, during a career of slightly over 19 years now. For that paper alone he merits an award.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
He wrote a good typesetting system, to bad he could not convince Microsoft to use it.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
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.
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 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.
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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If you don't think Lamport has made a real difference already, then either you have no idea who he is, or you don't think computers are very important.
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Sorry to disappoint you, but he's a guy.
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."
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 (from your POV).
More likely, the computer scientists cannot get their ideas past the marketdroids that run MS.
Leslie Nielsen would like to have a word with you.
Leslie Nielsen would like to have a word with you.
Surely you can't be serious!
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 sure from the Microsoft side.
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.
my request counter is 0!
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 clever optimization. (I actually vectorized a portion of the algorithm by way of the "unroll and jam" transformation, so I could test the state of multiple processors in parallel, rather than in serial order as described in the algorithm.) He actually took the time to respond to my email, and was quite gracious. His reply:
In the Bakery Algorithm, process i must wait until a certain condition holds for each other process. The order in which it checks for the different other processes does not matter. So, the algorithm can be parallelized in the manner you suggest.
The only time I was more thrilled on a topic like this was when Dr. Knuth replied to mail I sent him regarding a particular algorithm in Volume 4 of TAOCP. I actually received a hand written reply. Well, he hand wrote notes on a printed copy of the email I had sent to his TAOCP feedback address. Dr. Knuth also encourages me to let all my friends know how much I like TAOCP. So, consider yourself informed: I think Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming series is worth its weight in gold, and if you consider yourself a computer scientist or computer engineer, you should consider getting yourself a copy, and investing the time to at least skim it. (Let's face it, to truly understand everything in there would require as much time as Don put into writing it.)
Program Intellivision!