A combinatorial characterization of the distributed 1-solvable tasks
Journal of Algorithms
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
Wait-free k-set agreement is impossible: the topology of public knowledge
STOC '93 Proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
The asynchronous computability theorem for t-resilient tasks
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)
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
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 Combinatorial Structure of Wait-Free Solvable Tasks
SIAM Journal on Computing
A classification of wait-free loop agreement tasks
Theoretical Computer Science - Special issue: Distributed computing
The Iterated Restricted Immediate Snapshot Model
COCOON '08 Proceedings of the 14th annual international conference on Computing and Combinatorics
OPODIS '08 Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems
Tight group renaming on groups of size g is equivalent to g-consensus
DISC'09 Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Distributed computing
Distributed programming with tasks
OPODIS'10 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Principles of distributed systems
LATIN'10 Proceedings of the 9th Latin American conference on Theoretical Informatics
Subconsensus tasks: renaming is weaker than set agreement
DISC'06 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Distributed Computing
DISC'05 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Distributed Computing
Hi-index | 0.00 |
The theory of distributed computing shares a deep and fascinating connection with combinatorial and algebraic topology. One of the key ideas that facilitates the development of the topological theory of distributed computing is the use of iterated shared memory models. In such a model processes communicate through a sequence of shared objects. Processes access the sequence of objects, one-by-one, in the same order and asynchronously. Each process accesses each shared object only once. In the most basic form of an iterated model, any number of processes can crash, and the shared objects are snapshot objects. A process can write a value to such an object, and gets back a snapshot of its contents. The purpose of this paper is to give an introduction to this research area, using an iterated model based on the safe-consensus task (Afek, Gafni and Lieber, DISC@?09). In a safe-consensus task, the validity condition of consensus is weakened as follows. If the first process to invoke an object solving a safe-consensus task returns before any other process invokes it, then the process gets back its own input; otherwise the value returned by the task can be arbitrary. As with consensus, the agreement requirement is that always the same value is returned to all processes. A safe-consensus-based iterated model is described in detail. It is explained how its runs can be described with simplicial complexes. The usefulness of the iterated memory model for the topological theory of distributed computing is exhibited by presenting some new results (with very clean and well structured proofs) about the solvability of the (n,k)-set agreement task. Throughout the paper, the main ideas are explained with figures and intuitive examples.