calculon

Anything written by Leslie Lamport is worth the effort.

Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System (seminal paper which won various awards): http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...

That link actually takes you to a complete list of Lamport's works.

Brewer's CAP Theorem

The first link is the paper which constituted the proof of the theorem, the other two provide more context and background.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.20.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap-theor...

The grammatical error on the front page, amidst a burst of self-aggrandizement, doesn't exactly inspire confidence:

"Its built from the same guys who ran Obama's campaign and worked at Google. That means it's good:)"