ABSTRACT

Memoirs of an Internet Swamprat

Dave Mills

If the world's longest running distributed algorithm runs in the telephone system, the next longest running launched its first packet in what eventually became the Internet over a quarter century ago. Provisioning reliable, ubiquitous services such as multicast routing, name translation and time synchronization in quasi-reliable network infrastructures raises fascinating issues in reliability, agreement and synchronization methodologies.

Many insights have matured multiple times in past Internet adventures and now threaten to be rediscovered again. This talk will revisit a few monuments to first discovery and explore the implications to contemporary distributed algorithms which depend on cooperating, redundant servers and diverse network paths.


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