This paper describes art application of Byzantine Agreement [DoSt82a, DoSt82c, LyFF82] to distributed transaction commit. We replace the second phase of one of the commit algorithms of [MoLi83 ] with Byzantine Agreement, providing certain trade-offs and advantages at the time of commit and providing speed advantages at the time of recovery from failure. The present work differs from that presented in [DoSt82b] by increasing the scope (handing a general tree of processes, and multi-cluster

more »

... ctions) and by providing an explicit set of recovery algorithms. We also provide a model for classifying failures that allows comparisons to be made among various proposed distributed commit algorithms. The context for our work is the Highly Available Systems project at the IBM San Jose Research Laboratory [AAF-KM83 ]. © 1983 ACM 0-89791-110-5/83/008/0089 $00.75