The weakest failure detector for solving k-set agreement

Eli Gafni, Petr Kuznetsov

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

A failure detector is a distributed oracle that provides processes in a distributed system with hints about failures. The notion of a weakest failure detector captures the exact amount of synchrony needed for solving a given distributed computing problem. In this paper, we determine the weakest failure detector for solving k-set agreement among n processes (n > k) using reads and writes in shared memory, regardless of the assumptions on when and where failures might occur. This failure detector is derived directly from the impossibility of wait-free k+1-process k-set agreement. Our approach can be viewed as an extension of the asynchronous BG-simulation technique to partially synchronous systems.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPODC'09 - Proceedings of the 2009 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
Pages83-91
Number of pages9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 9 Nov 2009
Externally publishedYes
Event2009 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC'09 - Calgary, AB, Canada
Duration: 10 Aug 200912 Aug 2009

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Conference

Conference2009 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC'09
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityCalgary, AB
Period10/08/0912/08/09

Keywords

  • BG-simulation
  • Failure detectors
  • K-set agreement
  • Synchrony assumptions

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