{"doi":"10.1145/359545.359563","title":"Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system","abstract":"<jats:p>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.</jats:p>","journal":"Communications of the ACM","year":1978,"id":6526,"datarank":34.52011293490802,"base_score":9.036701015565063,"endowment":9.036701015565063,"self_citation_contribution":1.3555051523347597,"citation_network_contribution":33.16460778257326,"self_endowment_contribution":1.3555051523347597,"citer_contribution":33.16460778257326,"corpus_percentile":99.2,"corpus_rank":1793,"citation_count":8405,"citer_count":195,"citers_with_citation_signal":195,"citers_with_endowment":195,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"1978-07-01","authors":[{"id":60439,"name":"Leslie Lamport","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":4,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-03-01T18:20:47.508186Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}