Abstract
Distributed snapshots, as introduced by Chandy and Lamport in the context of asynchronous failure-free message-passing distributed systems, are consistent global states in which the observed distributed application might have passed through. It appears that two such distributed snapshots cannot necessarily be compared (in the sense of determining which one of them is the “first”). Differently, snapshots introduced in asynchronous crash-prone read/write distributed systems are totally ordered, which greatly simplify their use by upper layer applications.
In order to benefit from shared memory snapshot objects, it is possible to simulate a read/write shared memory on top of an asynchronous crash-prone message-passing system, and build then snapshot objects on top of it. This algorithm stacking is costly in both time and messages. To circumvent this drawback, this paper presents algorithms building snapshot objects directly on top of asynchronous crash-prone message-passing system. “Directly” means here “without building an intermediate layer such as a read/write shared memory”. To the authors knowledge, the proposed algorithms are the first providing such constructions. Interestingly enough, these algorithms are efficient and relatively simple.
M. Raynal—The French authors were partially supported by the French ANR project DESCARTES devoted to abstraction layers in distributed computing. The third author was supported in part by UNAM PAPIIT-DGAPA project IN107714.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The main property of such a broadcast operation is that any message delivered by a (correct or faulty) process is delivered by all correct processes, and at least the messages broadcast by the correct processes are delivered. Hence all correct processes deliver the same set of messages S, and any faulty process delivers a subset of S. Algorithms implementing reliable broadcast in the presence of process crashes are described in many textbooks (e.g. [4, 17]).
- 2.
Let us notice that it is possible that several processes wrote snapshot values in repSnap[j, m] to help \(p_j\) terminate its snapshot invocation. Any of these values is a correct snapshot value.
References
Afek, Y., Attiya, H., Dolev, D., Gafni, E., Merritt, M., Shavit, N.: Atomic snapshots of shared memory. J. ACM 40(4), 873–890 (1993)
Attiya, H.: Efficient and robust sharing of memory in message-passing systems. J. Algorithms 34, 109–127 (2000)
Attiya, H., Bar-Noy, A., Dolev, D.: Sharing memory robustly in message passing systems. J. ACM 42(1), 121–132 (1995)
Attiya, H., Welch, J.: Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics, 2nd edn, 414 p. Wiley-Interscience (2004)
Chandy, K.M., Lamport, L.: Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 3(1), 63–75 (1985)
Cooper, R., Marzullo, K.: Consistent detection of global predicates. In: Proceedings of Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Debugging. ACM press (1991)
Delporte, C., Fauconnier, H., Rajsbaum, S., Raynal, M.: Implementing snapshot objects on top of crash-prone asynchronous message-passing systems, 15 p. Technical report 2037, IRISA, Université de Rennes (F) (2016)
Dutta, P., Guerraoui, R., Levy, R., Vukolic, M.: Fast access to distributed atomic memory. SIAM J. Comput. 39(8), 3752–3783 (2010)
Hélary, J.-M., Mostéfaoui, A., Raynal, M.: Communication-induced determination of consistent snapshots. IEEE TPDS 10(9), 865–877 (1999)
Herlihy, M.P.: Wait-free synchronization. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. (TOPLAS) 13(1), 124–149 (1991)
Herlihy, M.P., Wing, J.M.: Linearizability: a correctness condition for concurrent objects. ACM TOPLAS 12(3), 463–492 (1990)
Imbs, D., Raynal, M.: Help when needed, but no more: efficient read/write partial snapshot. J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 72(1), 1–12 (2012)
Inoue, M., Masuzawa, T., Chen, W., Tokura, N.: Linear-time snapshot using multi-writer multi-reader registers. In: Tel, G., Vitányi, P. (eds.) WDAG 1994. LNCS, vol. 857, pp. 130–140. Springer, Heidelberg (1994). doi:10.1007/BFb0020429
Lai, T.H., Yang, T.H.: On distributed snapshots. Inf. Process. Lett. 25, 153–158 (1987)
Lamport, L.: Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. Commun. ACM 21(7), 558–565 (1978)
Mostéfaoui, A., Raynal, M.: Two-bit messages are sufficient to implement atomic read/write registers in crash-prone systems. In: Proceedings of 35th International ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2016), pp. 381–390. ACM Press (2016)
Raynal, M.: Communication and Agreement Abstractions for Fault-Tolerant Asynchronous Distributed Systems, 251 p. Morgan & Claypool Publishers (2010). ISBN 978-1-60845-293-4
Raynal, M.: Distributed Algorithms for Message-Passing Systems, 510 p. Springer (2013). ISBN 978-3-642-38122-5
Raynal, M.: Concurrent Programming: Algorithms, Principles and Foundations, 515 p. Springer (2013). ISBN 978-3-642-32026-2
Taubenfeld, G.: Synchronization Algorithms and Concurrent Programming, 423 p. Pearson Prentice-Hall (2006). ISBN 0-131-97259-6
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Delporte-Gallet, C., Fauconnier, H., Rajsbaum, S., Raynal, M. (2016). Implementing Snapshot Objects on Top of Crash-Prone Asynchronous Message-Passing Systems. In: Carretero, J., Garcia-Blas, J., Ko, R., Mueller, P., Nakano, K. (eds) Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing. ICA3PP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10048. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49583-5_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49583-5_26
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49582-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49583-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)