Distributed Systems Classics

A selected list of timeless and influential papers in distributed systems that shaped the research in the field. Intended to serve as a good starting point for a better understanding of the problem space.

• Leslie Lamport. 1978. Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. https://doi.org/10.1145/359545.359563
• Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease. 1982. The Byzantine Generals Problem. https://doi.org/10.1145/357172.357176
• K. Mani Chandy and Leslie Lamport. 1985. Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/214451.214456
• Michael J. Fischer, Nancy A. Lynch, and Michael S. Paterson. 1985. Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process. https://doi.org/10.1145/3149.214121
• Brian M. Oki and Barbara H. Liskov. 1988. Viewstamped Replication: A New Primary Copy Method to Support Highly-Available Distributed Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/62546.62549
• Leslie Lamport. 1998. The part-time parliament. https://doi.org/10.1145/279227.279229
• Leslie Lamport. 2001. Paxos Made Simple. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/paxos-made-simple/
• Satoshi Nakamoto. 2008. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper
• Marc Shapiro, Nuno Preguiça, Carlos Baquero, and Marek Zawirski. 2011. Conflict-free replicated data types. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2050613.2050642
• Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout. 2014. In search of an understandable consensus algorithm. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2643634.2643666