In Memoriam: Edsger W. Dijkstra

In Memoriam: Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, died of cancer on 6 August 2002 at his home in Nuenen, the Netherlands. Dijkstra was a towering figure whose scientific contributions permeate major domains of computer science. He was a thinker, scholar, and teacher in renaissance style: working alone or in a close-knit group o...

A Discipline of Programming

Edsger W . Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing

In 1985 Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson (FLP) proved that consensus is not attainable in asynchronous message passing systems with failures. In the following years, Loui and Abu-Amara, and Herlihy proved that solving consensus in an asynchronous shared memory system is harder than implementing a read/write register. However, it was not known whether read/ write registers are implementable in async...

GPU Acceleration and Interactive Visualization for Spatio-Temporal Networks

The Structure of the "THE"-Multiprogramming

A multiprogramming system is described in which all activities are divided over a number of sequential processes. These sequential processes are placed at various hierarchical levels, in each of which one or more independent abstractions have been implemented. The hierarchical structure proved to be vital for the verification of the logical soundness of the design and the correctness of its imp...