Indulgent algorithms (preliminary version)

  • Authors:
  • Rachid Guerraoui

  • Affiliations:
  • Communication Systems Department, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, CH 1015 Lausanne

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the nineteenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Informally, an indulgent algorithm is a distributed algorithm that tolerates unreliable failure detection: the algorithm is indulgent towards its failure detector. This paper formally characterises such algorithms and states some of their interesting features. We show that indulgent algorithms are inherently safe and uniform. We also state impossibility results for indulgent solutions to divergent problems like consensus, and failure-sensitive problems like non-blocking atomic commit and terminating reliable broadcast.