Abstract
This chapter is on the detection of the termination of a distributed computation. This problem was posed and solved for the first time in the early 1980s independently by E.W. Dijkstra and C.S. Scholten (1980) and N. Francez (1980). This is a non-trivial problem. While, in sequential computing, the termination of the only process indicates that the computation has terminated, this is no longer true in distributed computing. Even if we were able to observe simultaneously all the processes, observing all of them passive could not allow us to conclude that the distributed execution has terminated. This is because some messages can still be in transit, which will reactivate their destination processes when they arrive, and these re-activations will, in turn, entail the sending of new messages, etc.
This chapter presents several models of asynchronous computations and observation/detection algorithms suited to termination detection in each of them. As in other chapters, the underlying channels are not required to be FIFO. Moreover, while channels are bidirectional, the term “output” channels (resp., “input” channels) is used when considering message send (resp., message reception).
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Raynal, M. (2013). Distributed Termination Detection. In: Distributed Algorithms for Message-Passing Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38123-2_14
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