Distributed Universal Constructions: a Guided Tour
Abstract
The notion of a universal construction is central in computing science: the wheel has not to be reinvented for each new problem. In the context of n-process asynchronous distributed systems, a universal construction is an algorithm that is able to build any object defined by a sequential specification despite the occurrence of up to (n − 1) process crash failures. The aim of this paper is to present a guided tour of such universal constructions. Its spirit is not to be a catalog of the numerous constructions proposed so far, but a (as simple as possible) presentation of the basic concepts and mechanisms that constitute the basis these constructions rest on.
Keywords
Abortable object
Agreement problem
Asynchronous read/write system
Atomic opera-
tions
Computability
Concurrent object
Consensus
Crash failure
Disjoint-access parallelism
Help
mechanism
LL/SC instruction
Memory location
Non-blocking
Obstruction-freedom
Progress
condition
Sequential specification
k-Set agreement
k-Simultaneous consensus
Speculative execu-
tion
Universal construction
Wait-freedom
Domains
Computer Science [cs]
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)
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