»In which we have built a competitive system

Tushar Chandra, Robert Griesemer, and Joshua Redstone published a paper on a commercial implementation of Leslie Lamport's Paxos [a href="http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf" title="Offsite: Paxos Made Simple (PDF)">PDF] consensus algorithm; they describe their efforts at building and deploying their system in Paxos Made Live. (The paper appeared in PODC '07: 26th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, and is published at the link above through Google.) Synchronization, consensus, and contention-resolution are fundamental and beautiful problems in a distributed system, and I enjoyed reading this paper (Disclaimer: I was a peer reviewer for the paper in draft).