An Alternate representation of distributed computations
Abstract
This paper proposes another representation of the event partially ordered set of distributed executions which relies on diagrams called arc diagrams. Arc diagrams are already in use within order theory and appears to have useful properties which can be of interest to distributed algorithms. It is shown that arc diagrams describe efficiently event ordering relations as well as reachable global states. Access to both of those levels is done without switching between different representations. Furthermore, this representation allows to decompose the event set into chains and yields to nearly optimal linear extensions. These linear extensions can beviewed as the nearest linear extensions of the poset that ca be produced. Those can be efficiently used to detect a new kind of global predicates called greedy predicates.