Proceedings of the eighth annual ACM Symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Renaming in an asynchronous environment
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Atomic snapshots of shared memory
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Immediate atomic snapshots and fast renaming
PODC '93 Proceedings of the twelfth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
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
Sharing memory robustly in message-passing systems
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
The decidability of distributed decision tasks (extended abstract)
STOC '97 Proceedings of the twenty-ninth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
A simple algorithmically reasoned characterization of wait-free computation (extended abstract)
PODC '97 Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Towards a topological characterization of asynchronous complexity
PODC '97 Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Unifying synchronous and asynchronous message-passing models
PODC '98 Proceedings of the seventeenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
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
Fault-tolerant wait-free shared objects
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Atomic Snapshots in O (n log n) Operations
SIAM Journal on Computing
Three-Processor Tasks Are Undecidable
SIAM Journal on Computing
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
The BG distributed simulation algorithm
Distributed Computing
Introduction to Distributed Algorithms
Introduction to Distributed Algorithms
The Combinatorial Structure of Wait-Free Solvable Tasks
SIAM Journal on Computing
New Perspectives in Distributed Computing
MFCS '99 Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
A classification of wait-free loop agreement tasks
Theoretical Computer Science - Special issue: Distributed computing
Real-time dependable decisions in timed asynchronous distributed systems
WORDS '97 Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Object-Oriented Real-Time Dependable Systems - (WORDS '97)
Mathematical Structures in Computer Science
Computable obstructions to wait-free computability
Distributed Computing
Proceedings of the thirty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Using the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem: Lectures on Topological Methods in Combinatorics and Geometry
Using the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem: Lectures on Topological Methods in Combinatorics and Geometry
An impossibility about failure detectors in the iterated immediate snapshot model
Information Processing Letters
Distributed programming with tasks
OPODIS'10 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Principles of distributed systems
DISC'11 Proceedings of the 25th international conference on Distributed computing
Renaming with k-set-consensus: an optimal algorithm into n + k - 1 slots
OPODIS'06 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Principles of Distributed Systems
Simultaneous consensus tasks: a tighter characterization of set-consensus
ICDCN'06 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Distributed Computing and Networking
ICDCN'06 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Distributed Computing and Networking
The committee decision problem
LATIN'06 Proceedings of the 7th Latin American conference on Theoretical Informatics
An Introduction to the Topological Theory of Distributed Computing with Safe-consensus
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
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We propose the musical benches problem to model a wait-free coordination difficulty that is orthogonal to previously studied ones such as agreement or symmetry breaking (leader election or renaming). A bench is the usual binary consensus problem for 2 processes. Assume n+1 processes want to sit in n benches as follows. Each one starts with a preference, consisting of a bench and one place (left or right) in the bench where it wants to sit. Each process should produce as output the place of the bench where it decides to sit. It is required that no two processes sit in different places of the same bench. Upon the observance of a conflict in one of the benches an undecided process can “abandon” its initial bench and place and try to sit in another bench at another place. The musical benches problem is so called because processes jump from bench to bench trying to find one in which they may be alone or not in conflict with one another. If at most one process starts in each bench, the problem is trivially solvable– each process stays in its place. We show that if there is just one bench where two processes rather than one, start, the problem is wait-free unsolvable in read/write shared memory. This impossibility establishes a new connection between distributed computing and topology, via the Borsuk-Ulam theorem. The musical benches problem seems like just a collection of consensus problems, where by the pigeon hole principle at least one of them will have to be solved by two processes. Consequently, one is tempted to try to find a bivalency impossibility proof of the FLP style. Our second result shows that there is no such proof: We present an algorithm to solve the musical benches problem using set agreement, a primitive stronger than read/write registers, but weaker than consensus. Thus, an FLP-style impossibility for musical benches will imply an FLP-style impossibility of set-consensus. The musical benches problem can be generalized by considering benches other than consensus, such as set agreement or renaming, leading to a very interesting class of new problems.