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Automatically Adjusting Concurrency to the Level of Synchrony

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Book cover Distributed Computing (DISC 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8784))

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Abstract

The state machine approach is a well-known technique for building distributed services requiring high performance and high availability, by replicating servers, and by coordinating client interactions with server replicas using consensus. Indulgent consensus algorithms exist for realistic eventually partially synchronous models, that never violate safety and guarantee liveness once the system becomes synchronous. Unavoidably, these algorithms may never terminate, even when no processor crashes, if the system never becomes synchronous.

This paper proposes a mechanism similar to state machine replication, called RC-simulation, that can always make progress, even if the system is never synchronous. Using RC-simulation, the quality of the service will adjust to the current level of asynchrony of the network — degrading when the system is very asynchronous, and improving when the system becomes more synchronous. RC-simulation generalizes the state machine approach in the following sense: when the system is asynchronous, the system behaves as if k + 1 threads were running concurrently, where k is a function of the asynchrony.

In order to illustrate how the RC-simulation can be used, we describe a long-lived renaming implementation. By reducing the concurrency down to the asynchrony of the system, RC-simulation enables to obtain renaming quality that adapts linearly to the asynchrony.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS and University Paris Diderot, France

    Pierre Fraigniaud

  2. Dpt. of Computer Science, UCLA, USA

    Eli Gafni

  3. Instituto de Matemáticas, UNAM, Mexico

    Sergio Rajsbaum

  4. LAAS-CNRS, CNRS and U. Toulouse, France

    Matthieu Roy

Authors
  1. Pierre Fraigniaud
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  2. Eli Gafni
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  3. Sergio Rajsbaum
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  4. Matthieu Roy
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Freiburg, 79110, Freiburg, Germany

    Fabian Kuhn

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Fraigniaud, P., Gafni, E., Rajsbaum, S., Roy, M. (2014). Automatically Adjusting Concurrency to the Level of Synchrony. In: Kuhn, F. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8784. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45174-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45174-8_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-45173-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-45174-8

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