The Part-Time Parliament.

Lamport, L. (1998). The Part-Time Parliament. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 16(2), 133-169.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1998

Volume

16

Issue

2

Pages

133-169

DOI

10.1145/279227.279229

DOI registrant

Association for Computing Machinery

Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/279227.279229

Cited from

cognitive_science, computer_science, linguistics_semiotics, systems_cybernetics

Cited by

6 citations across 6 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Adjacency Pair
  • The ritual mechanism that re-establishes a missed versicle/response transfers to liveness-preserving consensus protocols and their re-election machinery.

    This sourceDefines the Paxos consensus protocol; supports the analogy to liveness-preserving consensus and re-election machinery as repair.

• Common Ground
  • A consensus protocol like two-phase commit or Raft does not let a coordinator act on a value merely received by a majority; it requires an explicit acknowledgement round so the value is known to be known before it is committed, because acting on merely-mutually-known state risks a split-brain where two nodes commit conflicting values.

    This sourcePresents the Paxos consensus protocol, which uses acknowledgement rounds so a committed value is known-to-be-known by a quorum before action, guarding against split-brain.

• Consensus
  • The fault model is crash-stop with asynchronous messaging, and the Threshold is that the system tolerates f failures with 2f + 1 replicas.
• Fault Tolerance
  • The quantified tolerance bound (N components, f failures, proof of (N,f)-fault-tolerance)

    This sourceIntroduces Paxos; proves consensus with forward progress in the presence of a majority, i.e. tolerance of up to f crash failures with N >= 2f+1.

• Redundancy
  • ). Data storage (RAID ⅕/6/10, erasure coding, multi-region replication in modern cloud storage, distributed backup). Distributed systems (replicated state machines, Paxos/Raft consensus, database replicas, quorum reads/writes, primary-secondary replication patterns

    This sourcePaxos consensus correlated-failure coverage.

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    Lamport's abstract supplies the Paxos/replicated-state-machine half of this list — consensus implemented as replicated state machines — but nothing about RAID, erasure coding, multi-region replication, or quorum reads/writes.

    “The legislators maintained consistent copies of the parliamentary record, despite their frequent forays from the chamber and the forgetfulness of their messengers. The Paxon parliament's protocol provides a new way of implementing the state machine approach to the design of distributed systems.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Mechanisms

• Paxos-Style Quorum Protocol
  • The dueling proposers race, but the shard never ends up with two lease-holders.

    This sourceLamport's Paxos account shows how concurrent proposers can race while quorum intersection preserves one consistent choice, including a time-bounded officeholder example.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 6 citations: 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:8da5421c7e04 · see in the full table