The document is a summary of a paper titled "Fundamentals of Distributed Computing: A Practical Tour of Vector Clock Systems" by Roberto Baldoni and Michel Raynal. The paper discusses distributed computing involving processes that cooperate to achieve a common goal without sharing global memory, and instead communicate through message passing over a network with unpredictable delays. A key concept discussed is causality and determining whether events in a distributed system are causally related.

1. February 2002
Fundamentals of Distributed Computing:
A Practical Tour of Vector Clock Systems
Roberto Baldoni • Universita di Roma, Italy
Michel Raynal • IRISA, France
A distributed computation consists of a set of processes that cooperate
to achieve a common goal. A main characteristic of these computations
is that the processes do not already share a common global memory and
that they communicate only by exchanging messages over a
communication network. Moreover, message transfer delays are finite
yet unpredictable. This computation model defines what is known as the
asynchronous distributed system model, which includes systems that
span large geographic areas and are subject to unpredictable loads.
A key concept of asynchronous distributed systems is causality. More precisely, given two
events in a distributed computation, a crucial problem is knowing whether they are causally
related. Cou