Lamport Clock
A logical clock that assigns monotonically increasing timestamps sufficient to establish a causality-compatible ordering of distributed events.
Distributed-Systems Context
A Lamport clock increments on every local event and updates to max(local, received) + 1 when a message is received. This guarantees that if one event causally precedes another, its logical timestamp is smaller.
Causality Boundary
The converse does not hold: comparing two Lamport timestamps cannot prove causality, and the clock cannot distinguish concurrent events from events that merely received different scalar timestamps.
Related Distributed-Systems Concepts
- Vector Clock
- Causality
- Logical Time
- Distributed System