A topological treatment of early-deciding set-agreement

  • Authors:
  • Rachid Guerraoui;Maurice Herlihy;Bastian Pochon

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL, Switzerland;Department of Computer Science, Brown University, United States;School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The k-set-agreement problem consists for a set of n processes to agree on less than k among n possibly different values, each initially known to only one process. The problem is at the heart of distributed computing and generalizes the celebrated consensus problem. This paper considers the k-set-agreement problem in a synchronous message passing distributed system where up to t processes can fail by crashing. We determine the number of communication rounds needed for all correct processes to reach a decision in a given run, as a function of the degree of coordination k and the number of processes that actually fail in the run, f@?t. We prove that, for any integer 1@?k