ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Generalized FLP impossibility result for t-resilient asynchronous computations
STOC '93 Proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
More choices allow more faults: set consensus problems in totally asynchronous systems
Information and Computation
Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process
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
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
The topological structure of asynchronous computability
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Wait-Free k-Set Agreement is Impossible: The Topology of Public Knowledge
SIAM Journal on Computing
Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system
Communications of the ACM
Distributed Algorithms
PODC '12 Proceedings of the 2012 ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
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State machine replication reduces distributed to centralized computing. Any sequential service, modeled by a state machine, can be replicated over any number of processes and made highly available to all of them. At the heart of this fundamental reduction lies the so called universal consensus abstraction, key to providing the illusion of single shared service, despite replication. Yet, as universal as it may be, consensus is just one specific instance of a more general abstraction, k-set consensus where, instead of agreeing on a unique decision, the processes may diverge but at most k different decisions are reached. It is legitimate to ask whether the celebrated state machine replication construct has its analogue with k 1. If it did not, one could question the aura of distributed computing deserving an underpinning Theory for 1, the unit of multiplication, would be special in a field, distributed computing, that does not arithmetically multiply. This paper presents, two decades after k-set consensus was introduced, the generalization with k 1 of state machine replication. We show that with k-set consensus, any number of processes can emulate k state machines of which at least one remains highly available. While doing so, we also generalize the very notion of consensus universality.