The a16z Show · Monday, July 13, 2026
Barbara Liskov discussed her early work on view-stamp replication, explaining that a key focus was on handling failures in distributed systems. The goal was to ensure computations either completed successfully or had no impact if nodes failed, a challenge addressed by using atomic transactions and two-phase commit protocols.
“And one of the interesting things about Argus was that we had to worry not just about concurrency, but also failures.”
“And we had computations there that would visit several nodes of the network and then at the end, we had to make sure that such a computation either happened completely or had no impact whatsoever.”
“And so of course, we picked up transactions from databases systems. And we ran those computations as atomic transactions. And we had a two-phase commit protocol going on.”