Related papers: What's Live? Understanding Distributed Consensus
There has been on-going philosophical debate on whether artificial life models, also known as digital organisms, are truly alive. The main difficulty appears to be finding an encompassing and definite definition of life. By examining…
Agreement plays a central role in distributed systems working on a common task. The increasing size of modern distributed systems makes them more susceptible to single component failures. Fault-tolerant distributed agreement protocols rely…
The model of asynchronous programming arises in many contexts, from low-level systems software to high-level web programming. We take a language-theoretic perspective and show general decidability and undecidability results for asynchronous…
Community detection methods attempt to divide a network into groups of nodes that share similar properties, thus revealing its large-scale structure. A major challenge when employing such methods is that they are often degenerate, typically…
We verify the correctness of a variety of mutual exclusion algorithms through model checking. We look at algorithms where communication is via shared read/write registers, where those registers can be atomic or non-atomic. For the…
This paper poses that transition systems constitute a good model of distributed systems only in combination with a criterion telling which paths model complete runs of the represented systems. Among such criteria, progress is too weak to…
Lower bounds and impossibility results in distributed computing are both intellectually challenging and practically important. Hundreds if not thousands of proofs appear in the literature, but surprisingly, the vast majority of them apply…
Distributed consensus has been intensively studied in recent years as a means to mitigate state differences among dynamic nodes on a graph. It has been successfully employed in various applications, e.g., formation control of multi-robots,…
Algorithms for the synchronisation of clocks across networks are both common and important within distributed systems. We here address not only the formal modelling of these algorithms, but also the formal verification of their behaviour.…
We present a novel mathematical framework for the specification and analysis of fault-resilient distributed protocols and their implementations, with the following components: 1. Transition systems that allow the specification and analysis…
We consider the problem of verifying liveness for systems with a finite, but unbounded, number of processes, commonly known as parameterised systems. Typical examples of such systems include distributed protocols (e.g. for the dining…
The robustness of distributed systems is usually phrased in terms of the number of failures of certain types that they can withstand. However, these failure models are too crude to describe the different kinds of trust and expectations of…
Notes for the Yale course CPSC 465/565 Theory of Distributed Systems. Table of Contents: 1 Introduction, 2 Model, 3 Broadcast and convergecast, 4 Distributed breadth-first search, 5 Leader election, 6 Causal ordering and logical clocks, 7…
At our behest or otherwise, while our software is being executed, a huge variety of design assumptions is continuously matched with the truth of the current condition. While standards and tools exist to express and verify some of these…
Various programming tools, languages, and environments give programmers the impression of changing a program while it is running. This experience of liveness has been discussed for over two decades and a broad spectrum of research on this…
We study the performance of asymptotic and approximate consensus algorithms under harsh environmental conditions. The asymptotic consensus problem requires a set of agents to repeatedly set their outputs such that the outputs converge to a…
As machine learning and algorithmic decision making systems are increasingly being leveraged in high-stakes human-in-the-loop settings, there is a pressing need to understand the rationale of their predictions. Researchers have responded to…
Correctness of multi-threaded programs typically requires that they satisfy liveness properties. For example, a program may require that no thread is starved of a shared resource, or that all threads eventually agree on a single value. This…
The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic…
State machine replication protocols, like MultiPaxos and Raft, are at the heart of nearly every strongly consistent distributed database. To tolerate machine failures, these protocols must replace failed machines with live machines, a…