The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system
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.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Protocols for Public Key Cryptosystems
Merkle, R. C. (1980) · 1980 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy · doi:10.1109/sp.1980.10006 · Cited by 1,418
Concurrency control in groupware systems
Ellis, C. A., & Gibbs, S. J. (1989) · ACM SIGMOD Record · doi:10.1145/66926.66963 · Cited by 873
Exploiting virtual synchrony in distributed systems
Birman, K., & Joseph, T. (1987) · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review · doi:10.1145/37499.37515 · Cited by 601
Simple, accurate time synchronization for wireless sensor networks
Sichitiu, M. L., & Veerarittiphan, C. (2004) · 2003 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking, 2003. WCNC 2003. · doi:10.1109/wcnc.2003.1200555 · Cited by 490
Speculative execution in a distributed file system
Nightingale, E. B., Chen, P. M., & Flinn, J. (2005) · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review · doi:10.1145/1095809.1095829 · Cited by 94
Metadata
- Authors
- Massachusetts Computer Associates, I., & Lamport, L.
- Venue
- Concurrency: the Works of Leslie Lamport
- Publisher
- Association for Computing Machinery
- Published
- 2019-10-09
- OpenAlex
- W1973501242
- Cited by
- 1,979
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 73.08
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/3335772.3335934
- The paper
- Massachusetts Computer Associates, I., & Lamport, L. (2019). Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. Concurrency: the Works of Leslie Lamport. https://doi.org/10.1145/3335772.3335934
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
