Wait-free dining under eventual weak exclusion
ICDCN'08 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Distributed computing and networking
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This thesis describes theoretical and practical contributions to isolating partial failures in distributed systems to small, local neighborhoods of impact. Specifically, we develop scalable techniques for minimizing the impact of crash faults in a broad class of static resource allocation problems. Our particular lens of investigation focuses on the generalized dining philosophers problem as a fundamental abstraction for distributed resource allocation. Within this domain of inquiry, we construct fault-tolerant algorithms that restrict the scope of failures precipitated by crash faults. Additionally, we prove impossibility results for our techniques and optimality results for our constructions under different models of mutual exclusion and process synchronization. An overarching theme of our work is the central role of locality (and the limitations imposed by local knowledge) in the construction of scalable algorithms supporting the survivability and availability of distributed systems from a global perspective.