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  4. Never Say Never Probabilistic & Temporal Failure Detectors
 
conference paper

Never Say Never Probabilistic & Temporal Failure Detectors

Dzung, Dacfey
•
Guerraoui, Rachid  
•
Kozhaya, David  
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2016
2016 Ieee 30Th International Parallel And Distributed Processing Symposium (Ipdps 2016)
30th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS)

The failure detector approach for solving distributed computing problems has been celebrated for its modularity. This approach allows the construction of algorithms using abstract failure detection mechanisms, defined by axiomatic properties, as building blocks. The minimal synchrony assumptions on communication, which enable to implement the failure detection mechanism, are studied separately. Such synchrony assumptions are typically expressed as eventual guarantees that need to hold, after some point in time, forever and deterministically. But in practice, they never do. Synchrony assumptions may hold only probabilistically and temporarily. In this paper, we study failure detectors in a realistic distributed system N, with asynchrony inflicted by probabilistic synchronous communication. We address the following paradox: an implementation of "consensus with probability 1" is possible in N without using randomness in the algorithm itself, while an implementation of "lozenge S with probability 1" is impossible to achieve in N (lozenge S being the weakest failure detector to solve the consensus problem and many equivalent problems). We circumvent this paradox by introducing a new failure detector lozenge S*, a variant of lozenge S with probabilistic and temporal accuracy. We prove that lozenge S* is implementable in N and we provide an optimal lozenge S* algorithm. Interestingly, we show that lozenge S* can replace lozenge S, in several existing deterministic consensus algorithms using lozenge S, to yield an algorithm that solves "consensus with probability 1". In fact, we show that such result holds for all decisive problems (not only consensus) and also for failure detector lozenge P (not only lozenge S). The resulting algorithms combine the modularity of distributed computing practices with the practicality of networking ones.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/Ipdps.2016.92
Web of Science ID

WOS:000391251800070

Author(s)
Dzung, Dacfey
Guerraoui, Rachid  
Kozhaya, David  
Pignolet, Yvonne-Anne
Date Issued

2016

Publisher

Ieee

Publisher place

New York

Published in
2016 Ieee 30Th International Parallel And Distributed Processing Symposium (Ipdps 2016)
ISBN of the book

978-1-5090-2140-6

Total of pages

10

Series title/Series vol.

International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium IPDPS

Start page

679

End page

688

Subjects

failure detection

•

probabilistic links

•

consensus

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DCL  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
30th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS)

Illinois Inst Technol, Chicago, IL

MAY 23-27, 2016

Available on Infoscience
February 17, 2017
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/134436
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