Distributed computing column 44 2011 in review

The last column of the year is dedicated, as always, to a review of distributed computing awards and conferences in 2011. The 2011 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing was awarded to Hagit Attiya, Amotz Bar-Noy, and Danny Dolev, for their fundamental work on Sharing Memory Robustly in Message-Passing Systems , which appeared in the Journal of the ACM (JACM) 42(1):124-142 (1995). This seminal paper, often dubbed ABD, was the rst to establish the equivalence between asynchronous fault-tolerant message passing systems and shared memory systems. Speci cally, the paper shows that, unlike consensus, atomic read-write registers can be implemented in faultprone asynchronous shared memory systems. The implication of this equivalence is that algorithms designed in the more abstract shared memory model can be directly be implemented in message passing systems. The ABD construction lies at the heart of many distributed storage systems built in the last decade, including scalable replicated storage used in today's large data centers and clouds. The Dijkstra Prize is jointly awarded by PODC and DISC; Amotz Bar-Noy and Hagit Attiya received it on behalf of the three authors in DISC this year (see picture). The full award citation appears earlier in this issue of SIGACT News (and on the award's web page), so I do not repeat it here. Instead, I include here Hagit Attiya's account of how the paper came to be, in the spirit of her address at the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize awarding ceremony. The Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing was awarded for the third time this year. The prize was established by SIROCCO to recognize individuals whose research contributions on the relationships between information and e ciency in decentralized computing have expanded the collective investigative horizon by formulating new problems, or identifying new research areas, that were at the time of their introduction unorthodox and outside the mainstream. The prize