Section: Scientific Foundations

Distributed Computing

Distributed computing was born in the late seventies when people started taking into account the intrinsic characteristics of physically distributed systems. The field then emerged as a specialized research area distinct from networks, operating systems and parallelism. Its birth certificate is usually considered as the publication in 1978 of Lamport's most celebrated paper “Time, clocks and the ordering of events in a distributed system” [56] (that paper was awarded the Dijkstra Prize in 2000). Since then, several high-level journals and (mainly ACM and IEEE) conferences have been devoted to distributed computing. The distributed systems area has continuously been evolving, following the progresses of all the above-mentioned areas such as networks, computing architecture, operating systems.

The last decade has witnessed significant changes in the area of distributed computing. This has been acknowledged by the creation of several conferences such as NSDI and IEEE P2P. The NSDI conference is an attempt to reassemble the networking and system communities while the IEEE P2P conference was created to be a forum specialized in peer-to-peer systems. At the same time, the EuroSys conference originated as an initiative of the European Chapter of the ACM SIGOPS to gather the system community in Europe.