Computing, IT & AI
Chandy-Lamport distributed snapshot
1985 CEK. Mani Chandy and Leslie LamportDistributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems (ACM TOCS, 1985)Diaspora (work abroad)
1985
An algorithm for recording a consistent picture of a distributed system without stopping it.
- Dated
- 1985
- As scholars put it
- 1985 CE
- Originator
- K. Mani Chandy and Leslie Lamport
- Source text
- Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems (ACM TOCS, 1985)
- Region
- Diaspora (work abroad)
- Discipline
- Computing, IT & AI
- Evidence
- Documented
- Confidence
- High
- Verification
- Verified-web
Background
In a system of many computers exchanging messages there is no global clock, so it is hard to say what state the whole system is in at any moment. K. Mani Chandy, an IIT Madras graduate now at Caltech, and Leslie Lamport showed how marker messages let every process record its state, together with the messages in transit, consistently.
Significance
A foundational result of distributed computing, used for checkpointing, debugging and detecting deadlock or termination.
Path to modern innovation
Stream-processing engines such as Apache Flink checkpoint with variants of it.
Global impact
- Fault-tolerant checkpointing in large data-processing systems.
References
- 3Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems
Further reading
Corrections and additional sources: edit IND-391 on GitHub.