Keeping track of the latest gossip in a distributed system

  • Authors:
  • Madhavan Mukund;Milind Sohoni

  • Affiliations:
  • SPIC Mathematical Institute, 92 G.N. Chetty Road, Madras 600017, India;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay 400 076, India

  • Venue:
  • Distributed Computing
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

We tackle a natural problem from distributed computing, involving time-stamps. Let p={p1,p2, ...,pN} be a set of computing agents or processes which synchronize with each other from time to time and exchange information about themselves and others. The gossip problem is the following: Whenever a set P ⊆ P meets, the processes in P must decide amongst themselves which of them has the latest information, direct or indirect, about each agent p in the system. We propose an algorithm to solve this problem which is finite-state and local. Formally, this means that our algorithm can be implemented as an asynchronous automation.