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On the importance of having an identity or, is consensus really universal?

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Abstract

We show that Naming - the existence of distinct IDs known to all - is a hidden, but necessary, assumption of Herlihy's universality result for Consensus. We then show in a very precise sense that Naming is harder than Consensus and bring to the surface some relevant differences existing between popular shared memory models.

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Received: 24 January 2002, Revised: 15 October 2002, Accepted: 19 November 2004, Published online: 10 March 2005

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Buhrman, H., Panconesi, A., Silvestri, R. et al. On the importance of having an identity or, is consensus really universal?. Distrib. Comput. 18, 167–176 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-005-0121-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-005-0121-z

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