Of Choices, Failures and Asynchrony: The Many Faces of Set Agreement
Set agreement is a fundamental problem in distributed computing in which processes collectively choose a small subset of values from a larger set of proposals. The impossibility of fault-tolerant set agreement in asynchronous networks is one of the seminal results in distributed computing. In synchronous networks, too, the complexity of set agreement has been a significant research challenge that has now been resolved. Real systems, however, are neither purely synchronous nor purely asynchronous. Rather, they tend to alternate between periods of synchrony and periods of asynchrony. Nothing specific is known about the complexity of set agreement in such a "partially synchronous" setting.
art3A10.10072Fs00453-011-9581-7.pdf
Publisher's version
openaccess
1.04 MB
Adobe PDF
cc6bfdf3b9bb244f859a6ffe5769edea