Leslie Lamport Wins Turing Award
ACM:
For fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems, notably the invention of concepts such as causality and logical clocks, safety and liveness, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency.
Among Lamport’s many contributions, one of the most widely implemented is known as the Paxos algorithm, which can be found at work behind the scene in Google or Bing online searches, among much else. It allows a computer network to continue working in a coherent way even in the face of failures, by transferring leadership roles among machines and halting progress rather than allowing damage to occur to the system.
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Erik Meijer talks to Leslie Lamport: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/E2E-Erik-Meijer-and-Leslie-Lamport-Mathematical-Reasoning-and-Distributed-Systems
@Jesper Thanks for that link.
One of my favorite algorithms in computer science, maybe even above the PowerPC assembly instruction eieio, is the cluster fencing resolution technique STONITH, which I'll let you look up on Wikipedia.