STOC '92 Proceedings of the twenty-fourth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Distributed Algorithms
Robust Asynchronous Protocols Are Finite-State
ICALP '98 Proceedings of the 25th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming
Keeping track of the latest gossip in a distributed system
Distributed Computing
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In this paper we present a solution to the 'Latest Gossip Problem' for a shared memory distributed system. The Latest Gossip Problem is essentially one of bounded timestamping in which processes must locally keep track of the 'latest' information, direct or indirect, about all other processes. A solution to the Latest Gossip Problem is fundamental to the understanding of information flow in a distributed computation, and has applications to problems such as global state detection and mutual exclusion. Our solution is along the lines of that for message passing systems in [6], and for synchronously communicating systems. Our algorithm uses a modified version of the consume and update protocols of Dwork and Waarts [3], where these were introduced to construct a 'Bounded Concurrent Timestamping System (BCTS)'. As applications of our Gossip Protocol, we also indicate another construction of a BCTS and a solution to the global state detection problem, which, we believe, are improvements over older solutions.