In search of lost time

Authors:
Bernadette Charron-Bost;Martin Hutle;Josef Widder
Affiliations:
Ecole polytechnique, Laboratoire d'Informatique (LIX), 91128 Palaiseau Cedex, France;EPFL, Distributed Systems Laboratory (LSR), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland;TU Wien, Embedded Computing Systems Group, 1040 Wien, Austria
Venue:
Information Processing Letters
Year:
2010

Citing 8
Cited 1

On the minimal synchronism needed for distributed consensus

Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony

Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process

Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Unreliable failure detectors for reliable distributed systems

Journal of the ACM (JACM)
The weakest failure detector for solving consensus

Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Round-by-round fault detectors (extended abstract): unifying synchrony and asynchrony

PODC '98 Proceedings of the seventeenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
The part-time parliament

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Every problem has a weakest failure detector

Proceedings of the twenty-seventh ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing

Asynchronous failure detectors

PODC '12 Proceedings of the 2012 ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing

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Abstract

Dwork, Lynch, and Stockmeyer [3] and Lamport [4] showed that, in order to solve Consensus in a distributed system, it is sufficient that the system behaves well during a finite period of time. In sharp contrast, Chandra, Hadzilacos, and Toueg [6] proved that a failure detector that, from some time on, provides ''good'' information forever is necessary. We explain that this apparent paradox is due to the two-layered structure of the failure detector model. This structure also has impact on comparison relations between failure detectors. In particular, we make explicit why the classic relation is neither reflexive nor extends the natural history-wise inclusion. Our point is to help understanding existing models and to study how they model real distributed systems in an accurate way.