A mechanism for tracking causality between events across the different nodes of a distributed system, in which each node keeps its own counter and merges counters received from other nodes, letting the system tell whether one event happened before another or the two occurred independently.
Facts
Core PrincipleA vector clock is a data structure used for determining the partial ordering of events in a distributed system and detecting causality violations. 1 Connections
Associated With
Leslie Lamport, Pioneers Vector clocks, introduced by Colin Fidge and Friedemann Mattern, directly generalize the logical clock concept Leslie Lamport introduced in his 1978 paper on ordering events in distributed systems.
In Field
Sources
1. Vector clock - Wikipedia
History section
The papers canonically cited in reference to vector clocks are Colin Fidge's and Friedemann Mattern's 1988 works, as they (independently) established the name 'vector clock' and the mathematical properties of vector clocks.
Introduction (lead section)
A vector clock is a data structure used for determining the partial ordering of events in a distributed system and detecting causality violations.
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