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conference paper

On The Weakest Failure Detector Ever

Guerraoui, Rachid  
•
Herlihy, Maurice
•
Kouznetsov, Petr  
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2007
Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC'07)
26th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC'07)

Many problems in distributed computing are impossible when no information about process failures is available. So what is the minimal yet non-trivial failure information? In other words, what is the minimal information about failures needed to circumvent any impossibility and sufficient to circumvent some impossibility. This paper proposes a candidate abstraction, denoted ?, to capture this failure information. In every run of the distributed system, ? eventually informs the processes that some set of processes in the system cannot be the set of correct processes in that run. Although seemingly weak, for it might provide random information for an arbitrarily long period of time, and it only excludes one possibility of correct set among many, ? still captures non-trivial failure information. We show that ? is sufficient to circumvent the celebrated wait-free set-agreement impossibility. While doing so, we (a) disprove previous conjectures about the weakest failure detector to solve set-agreement and we (b) prove that solving set-agreement with registers is strictly weaker than solving n + 1-process consensus using n-process consensus. We prove that ? is, in some sense, necessary to circumvent any wait-free impossibility. As a corollary, set-agreement is, from a failure information perspective, a minimal wait-free impossible problem in distributed computing. Our results are generalized through an abstraction ?f that we introduce and prove necessary to solve any problem that cannot be solved in an f -resilient manner, and yet sufficient to solve f -resilient f -set-agreement.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/1281100.1281135
Web of Science ID

WOS:000266108700025

Author(s)
Guerraoui, Rachid  
Herlihy, Maurice
Kouznetsov, Petr  
Lynch, Nancy
Newport, Calvin
Date Issued

2007

Published in
Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC'07)
Start page

235

End page

243

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DCL  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
26th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC'07)

Portland, Oregon, USA

August, 12-15 2007

Available on Infoscience
June 24, 2007
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/9308
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