Corentin Travers

From static distributed systems to dynamic systems

A noteworthy advance in distributed computing is due to the recent development of peer-to-peer systems. These systems are essentially dynamic in the sense that no process can get a global knowledge on the system structure. They mainly allow processes to look up for data that can be dynamically added/suppressed in a permanently evolving set of nodes. Although protocols have been developed for such dynamic systems, to our knowledge, up to date no computation model for dynamic systems has been proposed. Nevertheless, there is a strong demand for the definition of such models as soon as one wants to develop provably correct protocols suited to dynamic systems. This paper proposes a model for (a class of) dynamic systems. That dynamic model is defined by (1) a parameter (an integer denoted a) and (2) two basic communication abstractions (query-response and persistent reliable broadcast). The new parameter is a threshold value introduced to capture the liveness part of the system (it is the counterpart of the minimal number of processes that do not crash in a static system). To show the relevance of the model, the paper adapts an eventual leader protocol designed for the static model, and proves that the resulting protocol is correct within the proposed dynamic model. In that sense, the paper has also a methodological flavor, as it shows that simple modifications to existing protocols can allow them to work in dynamic systems.

Crash-resilient time-free eventual leadership

Leader-based protocols rest on a primitive able to provide the processes with the same unique leader. Such protocols are very common in distributed computing to solve synchronization or coordination problems. Unfortunately, providing such a primitive is far from being trivial in asynchronous distributed systems prone to process crashes. (It is even impossible in fault-prone purely asynchronous systems.) To circumvent this difficulty, several protocols have been proposed that build a leader facility on top of an asynchronous distributed system enriched with synchrony assumptions. This paper consider another approach to build a leader facility, namely, it considers a behavioral property on the flow of messages that are exchanged. This property has the noteworthy feature not to involve timing assumptions. Two protocols based on this time-free property that implement a leader primitive are described. The first one uses potentially unbounded counters, while the second one (which is a little more involved) requires only finite memory. These protocols rely on simple design principles that make them attractive, easy to understand and provably correct.

In search of the holy grail: looking for the weakest failure detector for wait-free set agreement

Asynchronous failure detector-based set agreement algorithms proposed so far assume that all the processes participate in the algorithm. This means that (at least) the processes that do not crash propose a value and consequently execute the algorithm. It follows that these algorithms can block forever (preventing the correct processes from terminating) when there are correct processes that do not participate in the algorithm. This paper investigates the wait-free set agreement problem, i.e., the case where the correct participating processes have to decide a value whatever the behavior of the other processes (i.e., the processes that crash and the processes that are correct but do not participate in the algorithm). The paper presents a wait-free set agreement algorithm. This algorithm is based on a leader failure detector class that takes into account the notion of participating processes. Interestingly, this algorithm enjoys a first class property, namely, design simplicity.

The Iterated Restricted Immediate Snapshot Model

In the Iterated Immediate Snapshotmodel (

A TIME-FREE ASSUMPTION TO IMPLEMENT EVENTUAL LEADERSHIP

{\mathit{IIS}}

The k-simultaneous consensus problem

) the memory consists of a sequence of one-shot Immediate Snapshot(

The Combined Power of Conditions and Information on Failures to Solve Asynchronous Set Agreement

\mathit{IS}

Research note: From ♢W to Ω: A simple bounded quiescent reliable broadcast-based transformation

) objects. Processes access the sequence of

Strongly Terminating Early-Stopping k -Set Agreement in Synchronous Systems with General Omission Failures

\mathit{IS}

Synchronous Set Agreement: a Concise Guided Tour (including a new algorithm and a list of open problems)

objects, one-by-one, asynchronously, in a wait-freemanner; any number of processes can crash. Its interest lies in the elegant recursive structure of its runs, hence of the ease to analyze it round by round. In a very interesting way, Borowsky and Gafni have shown that the