Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system
Open Access
- 1 July 1978
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in Communications of the ACM
- Vol. 21 (7) , 558-565
- https://doi.org/10.1145/359545.359563
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.Keywords
This publication has 1 reference indexed in Scilit:
- Dissemination of System TimeIEEE Transactions on Communications, 1973