In the third page (the third paragraph in the right column) of the paper Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System by Leslie Lamport, it says thatThe reader may find it helpful to visualize a two-dimensional spatial network of processes, which yields a three-dimensional space-time diagram. Processes and messages are still represented by lines, but tick lines become two-dimensional surfaces.However I failed to visualize them in my head, especially the two-dimensional surfaces. Could anyone make more explanations? An illustrative picture would be excellent.
Visualization of Lamport's three-dimensional space-time diagram with introduced tick lines
distributed systems;intuition;clocks
Here's my take:...and here's a 3D version without the nice colors.Vertical black lines are processes; magenta lines are messages (wavy lines); spheres are events, and time is on the vertical (blue) axis.  The planes are 'tick lines.'  In Dr. Lamport's original diagrams, messages are only passed between adjacent processes.  Presumably in a real distributed system any process can send a message to any other process, but this is hard to draw clearly in a 2D diagram.