
Standing on Distributed Shoulders of Giants - yarapavan
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2953944
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_dark_matter_
If you're interested in this, the first relationship between Distributed
Systems and Relativity was realized by Leslie Lamport. Read about it on his
webpage, which includes his thoughts on the paper, as well as a link to the
paper:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#time-clocks)

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rmu09
"Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727) was a brilliant physicist who defined the
foundations for classical mechanics, laws of motion, and universal
gravitation. He also built the first refracting telescope, developed a theory
of color, and much more."

Newton invented the reflecting telescope, the refracting telescope was
invented around 1600.

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deadgrey19
"Latency is not decreasing too much and is limited by the speed of light."

This is not true in any realistic distributed system. Sure latency is not
decreasing much, but it is several orders of magnitude higher than the speed
of light. There's a lot of fat to trim if we are willing to try.

~~~
lostcolony
In context, I'm pretty sure it was just saying "Unlike computation, bandwidth,
and memory size, we haven't seen much improvement in latency, and even if we
focused on it, we have a very clear limit we can't get past".

I.e., latency is -always- going to be an issue, for everyone doing anything
distributed; it will never go away, or become so small as to effectively be
ignorable. You can trim the fat, which can improve the real-world experience
of certain things, but it doesn't actually solve, or even simplify, the hard
edge cases. It just may make them rarer.

~~~
deadgrey19
The idea that latency is currently bounded by the speed of light is what stops
people from fixing the fact that it is not. This is my objection.

~~~
rubiquity
What is the upper bound on latency?

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tedsuo
Another set of masterful distributed system engineers you can look at are the
US founding fathers. Like any implementation, it's far from perfect, but I
marvel at a system of government with enough fault tolerance, failover, and
backups built in to survive as long as it has.

~~~
tacone
IIRC it began as a master-slave architecture.

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gsmethells
Given our current computer architecture models, we'll run into Planck's
constant or some other universal constant eventually. Already the path forward
has more to do with increasing the number of cores rather than the performance
of a single core.

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gsmethells
"In a distributed system, you can know where the work is done or you can know
when the work is done but you can't know both."

A simple thought experiment will quickly tell you that's not true. Given a
task queue, the compute process that pulled the task and put a result could
easily provide where and when and give you both.

