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Efficient low-contention asynchronous consensus with the value-oblivious adversary scheduler

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Abstract.

We consider asynchronous consensus in the shared-memory setting. We present the first efficient low-contention consensus algorithm for the weak-adversary-scheduler model. The algorithm achieves consensus in \(O(n\log^2n)\) total work and \(O(\log n)\) (hot-spot) contention, both expected and with high probability. The algorithm assumes the value-oblivious scheduler, which is defined in the paper. Previous efficient consensus algorithms for weak adversaries suffer from \(\Omega(n)\) memory contention.

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Correspondence to Yonatan Aumann.

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Yonatan Aumann: This work was partially completed while theauthor was at Harvard University, supported in part by ONRcontract ONR-N00014-91-J-1981.

Michael A. Bender: This work was supported inpart by HRL Laboratories, Sandia National Laboratories, and NSF GrantsACI-032497, CCR-0208670, and EIA-0112849. This work was partiallycompleted while the author was at Harvard University, supported inpart by NSF grants CCR-9700365, CCR-9504436, and CCR-9313775.

An early version of this paper was presented in the 23rd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP ‘96) [8].

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Aumann, Y., Bender, M.A. Efficient low-contention asynchronous consensus with the value-oblivious adversary scheduler. Distrib. Comput. 17, 191–207 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-004-0113-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-004-0113-4

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