A modular approach to shared-memory consensus, with applications to the probabilistic-write model

James Aspnes
2010 Proceeding of the 29th ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS symposium on Principles of distributed computing - PODC '10  
We show that consensus can be solved by an alternating sequence of adopt-commit objects [2, 25] , which detect agreement, and conciliators, which ensure agreement with some probability. We observe that most known randomized consensus algorithms have this structure. We give a deterministic implementation of an m-valued adopt-commit object for an unbounded number of processes that uses lg m + Θ(log log m) space and individual work. We also give a randomized conciliator for any number of values in
more » ... the probabilistic-write model with n processes that guarantees agreement with constant probability while using one multi-writer register, O(log n) expected individual work, and Θ(n) expected total work. Combining these objects gives a consensus protocol for the probabilistic-write model that uses O(log m + log n) individual work and O(n log m) total work. No previous protocol in this model uses sublinear individual work or linear total work for constant m.
doi:10.1145/1835698.1835802 dblp:conf/podc/Aspnes10 fatcat:iypthg5uuvf5forxrycu2n5qkq