Asynchronous failure detectors
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Lynch_Asynchronous failure.pdf
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220.25 KB
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Author(s)
Cornejo Collado, Alex
Lynch, Nancy A.
Sastry, Srikanth
Date Issued
July 2012
Journal
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing - PODC '12
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Citation
Conrejo, Alejandro, Nancy Lynch, and Srikanth Sastry. “Asynchronous Failure Detectors.” Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing - PODC ’12 (2012), July 16–18, 2012, Madeira, Portugal. ACM New York, NY, USA. p.243-252.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Failure detectors - oracles that provide information about process crashes - are an important abstraction for crash tolerance in distributed systems. Although current failure-detector theory provides great generality and expressiveness, it also poses significant challenges in developing a robust hierarchy of failure detectors. We address some of these challenges by proposing a variant of failure detectors called asynchronous failure detectors and an associated modeling framework. Unlike the traditional failure-detector framework, our framework eschews real time completely. We show that asynchronous failure detectors are sufficiently expressive to include several popular failure detectors. Additionally, we show that asynchronous failure detectors satisfy many desirable properties: they are self-implementable, guarantee that stronger asynchronous failure detectors solve more problems, and ensure that their outputs encode no information other than process crashes. We introduce the notion of a failure detector being representative of a problem to capture the idea that some problems encode the same information about process crashes as their weakest failure detectors do. We show that a large class of problems, called finite problems, do not have representative failure detectors.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2332432.2332482
