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The k-simultaneous consensus problem

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Abstract

This paper introduces and investigates the k-simultaneous consensus task: each process participates at the same time in k independent consensus instances until it decides in any one of them. It is shown that the k-simultaneous consensus task is equivalent to the k-set agreement task in the wait-free read/write shared memory model, and furthermore k-simultaneous consensus possesses properties that k-set does not. In particular we show that the multivalued version and the binary version of the k-simultaneous consensus task are wait-free equivalent. These equivalences are independent of the number of processes. Interestingly, this provides us with a new characterization of the k-set agreement task that is based on the fundamental binary consensus problem.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Tel-Aviv University, 69978, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Yehuda Afek

  2. Department of Computer Science, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Eli Gafni

  3. Instituto de Matemáticas, UNAM, 04510, Mexico, Mexico

    Sergio Rajsbaum

  4. Université de Rennes 1, IRISA, Campus de Beaulieu, 35042, Rennes, France

    Michel Raynal

  5. Department of Computer Science, Technion, 32000, Haifa, Israel

    Corentin Travers

Authors
  1. Yehuda Afek
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  2. Eli Gafni
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  3. Sergio Rajsbaum
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  4. Michel Raynal
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  5. Corentin Travers
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michel Raynal.

Additional information

A preliminary draft of this paper has been presented at the conference ICDCN’06 [3].

Partially supported by PAPIIT-UNAM project IN116808.

Partially supported by the French ANR project SHAMAN.

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Afek, Y., Gafni, E., Rajsbaum, S. et al. The k-simultaneous consensus problem. Distrib. Comput. 22, 185–195 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-009-0090-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-009-0090-8

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