Professor Chandy's Paper Wins Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing

Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus, and Leslie Lamport's paper entitled “Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of a Distributed System” has received the 2014 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing. This prize is awarded for an outstanding paper on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at least a decade.

In their paper, Chandy and Lamport describe a distributed algorithm to record a consistent global state of an asynchronous distributed computation. Determining such a distributed snapshot is essential for several fundamental tasks and it is for example at the basis of solutions for termination or deadlock detection or to verify whether some other stable global property holds. [Read the paper]