Related papers: Better Sooner Rather Than Later
Each application developer desires to provide its users with consistent results and an always-available system despite failures. Boldly, the CALM theorem disagrees. It states that it is hard to design a system that is both consistent and…
Unintended failures during a computation are painful but frequent during software development. Failures due to external reasons (e.g., missing files, no permissions) can be caught by exception handlers. Programming failures, such as calling…
The famous Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson impossibility proof shows that it is impossible to solve the consensus problem in a natural model of an asynchronous distributed system if even a single process can fail. Since its publication, two…
In this paper, we consider the convergence of a very general asynchronous-parallel algorithm called ARock, that takes many well-known asynchronous algorithms as special cases (gradient descent, proximal gradient, Douglas Rachford, ADMM,…
The paper studies the problem of reaching agreement in a distributed message-passing system prone to crash failures. Crashes are generated by \constrained\ adversaries - a \wadapt\ adversary, who has to fix in advance the set of $f$…
We consider the following scheduling problem. A system is composed of $n$ processors drawn from a pool of $N$. The processors can become faulty while in operation and faulty processors never recover. A report is issued whenever a fault…
We demonstrate termination of binary consensus under the model and conditions used by Fischer, Lynch, and Patterson (FLP) to prove impossibility of binary agreement - in complete asynchrony and a possible process crash - in two steps.…
We consider a parallel system of $m$ identical machines prone to unpredictable crashes and restarts, trying to cope with the continuous arrival of tasks to be executed. Tasks have different computational requirements (i.e., processing time…
The Fischer-Lynch-Paterson theorem (FLP) says that it is impossible for processes in an asynchronous distributed system to achieve consensus on a binary value when a single process can fail; it is a widely cited theoretical result about…
Recent research has demonstrated that quantum computers can solve certain types of problems substantially faster than the known classical algorithms. These problems include factoring integers and certain physics simulations. Practical…
Fault tolerance overhead of high performance computing (HPC) applications is becoming critical to the efficient utilization of HPC systems at large scale. HPC applications typically tolerate fail-stop failures by checkpointing. Another…
In the 1980s, three related impossibility results emerged in the field of distributed computing. First, Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson demonstrated that deterministic consensus is unattainable in an asynchronous message-passing system when a…
It is shown that, in a precise sense, if there is no bound on the number of faulty processes in a system with unreliable but fair communication, Uniform Distributed Coordination (UDC) can be attained if and only if a system has perfect…
Recent advances in non-volatile main memory (NVRAM) technology have spurred research on designing algorithms that are resilient to process crashes. This paper is a fuller version of our conference paper \cite{jayanti:rmeabort}, which…
Fail-prone systems, and their quorum systems, are useful tools for the design of distributed algorithms. However, fail-prone systems as studied so far require every process to know the full system membership in order to guarantee safety…
Error-correction process has to be carried out periodically to prevent accumulation of errors in fault-tolerant quantum computation. It is believed that the best choice to get maximum threshold value is carrying out an error-correction…
We consider robust combinatorial optimization problems where the decision maker can react to a scenario by choosing from a finite set of $k$ solutions. This approach is appropriate for decision problems under uncertainty where the…
In this paper we address the problem of designing an interruptible system in a setting in which $n$ problem instances, all equally important, must be solved concurrently. The system involves scheduling executions of contract algorithms…
Mutual exclusion (ME) is one of the most commonly used techniques to handle conflicts in concurrent systems. Traditionally, mutual exclusion algorithms have been designed under the assumption that a process does not fail while…
Kahn Process Networks (KPNs) are a deterministic Model of Computation (MoC) for distributed systems. KPNs supports non-blocking writes and blocking reads, with the consequent assumption of unbounded buffers between processes. Variants such…