The Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing

Distributed computing

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...

, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at least a decade. The prize has been presented annually since 2000.

Originally the prize was presented at the ACM

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

 Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

The Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing is an academic conference in the field of distributed computing organised annually by the Association for Computing Machinery ....

 (PODC), and it was known as the PODC Influential-Paper Award. It was renamed in honor of Edsger W. Dijkstra in 2003, after he received the award for his work in self-stabilization

Self-stabilization

Self-stabilization is a concept of fault-tolerance in distributed computing. A distributed system that is self-stabilizing will end up in a correct state no matter what state it is initialized with...

 in 2002 and died shortly thereafter.

Since 2007, the prize is sponsored jointly by PODC and the EATCS

EATCS

The European Association for Theoretical Computer Science is an international organization with a European focus, founded in 1972...

 International Symposium on Distributed Computing

International Symposium on Distributed Computing

The International Symposium on Distributed Computing is an annual academic conference for refereed presentations, whose focus is the theory, design, analysis, implementation, and application of distributed systems and networks. The Symposium is organized in association with the European...

 (DISC), and the presentation takes place alternately at PODC (even years) and DISC (odd years). The prize includes an award of $2000.

Winners

Year	Paper	Topic
2000		Lamport logical clock
2001		Proving the impossibility of consensus Consensus (computer science) Consensus is a problem in distributed computing that encapsulates the task of group agreement in the presence of faults.In particular, any process in the group may fail at any time. Consensus is fundamental to core techniques in fault tolerance, such as state machine replication.- Problem...  using asynchronous communication Asynchronous communication In telecommunications, asynchronous communication is transmission of data without the use of an external clock signal, where data can be transmitted intermittently rather than in a steady stream. Any timing required to recover data from the communication symbols is encoded within the symbols...
2002		Self-stabilization Self-stabilization Self-stabilization is a concept of fault-tolerance in distributed computing. A distributed system that is self-stabilizing will end up in a correct state no matter what state it is initialized with...
2003	Maurice Herlihy Maurice Herlihy Maurice Herlihy is a computer scientist active in the field of multiprocessor synchronization. Herlihy has contributed to the design of concurrent algorithms, and in particular to the exposition and quantification of the properties and uses of hardware synchronization operations...	Solvability and universality of consensus Consensus (computer science) Consensus is a problem in distributed computing that encapsulates the task of group agreement in the presence of faults.In particular, any process in the group may fail at any time. Consensus is fundamental to core techniques in fault tolerance, such as state machine replication.- Problem...  in shared-memory Shared memory In computing, shared memory is memory that may be simultaneously accessed by multiple programs with an intent to provide communication among them or avoid redundant copies. Depending on context, programs may run on a single processor or on multiple separate processors...  systems
2004		Distributed algorithm to find a minimum spanning tree Minimum spanning tree Given a connected, undirected graph, a spanning tree of that graph is a subgraph that is a tree and connects all the vertices together. A single graph can have many different spanning trees...
2005		Byzantine agreement
2006		"probably the most influential practical mutual exclusion algorithm of all time"
2007		Solving consensus Consensus (computer science) Consensus is a problem in distributed computing that encapsulates the task of group agreement in the presence of faults.In particular, any process in the group may fail at any time. Consensus is fundamental to core techniques in fault tolerance, such as state machine replication.- Problem...  in partially synchronous systems
2008		Sparse partitions
2009		A formal framework for reasoning about knowledge in distributed systems
2010		Failure detector Failure detector In distributed computing, a failure detector is an application or a subsystem that is responsible for detection of node failures or crashes in a distributed system.- References :* .* .... s
2011		Simulating shared memory in fault-prone message-passing systems

Funding

The award is financed by ACM PODC and EATCS DISC, each providing an equal share of $1,000 towards the $2,000 of the award.

• The PODC share is financed by an endowment at ACM that is based on gifts from the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS), the AT&T Corporation, the Hewlett-Packard Company, the International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation, the Intel Corporation, and Sun Microsystems, Inc.

• The DISC share is financed by an endowment at EATCS that is based on contributions from several year's DISC budgets, and gifts from Microsoft Research
  Microsoft Research
  Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft created in 1991 for developing various computer science ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs Turing Award winners C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson, and Charles P...
  
  , the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.