Partial synchrony based on set timeliness

Marcos K. Aguilera, Carole Delporte-Gallet, Hugues Fauconnier, Sam Toueg
2009 Proceedings of the 28th ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing - PODC '09  
We introduce a new model of partial synchrony for read-write shared memory systems. This model is based on the notion of set timeliness-a natural and straightforward generalization of the seminal concept of timeliness in the partially synchrony model of Dwork, Lynch and Stockmeyer [11] . Despite its simplicity, the concept of set timeliness is powerful enough to define a family of partially synchronous systems that closely match individual instances of the t-resilient k-set agreement problem
more » ... ng n processes, henceforth denoted (t, k, n)-agreement. In particular, we use it to give a partially synchronous system that is is synchronous enough for solving (t, k, n)-agreement, but not enough for solving two incrementally stronger problems, namely, (t + 1, k, n)-agreement, which has a slightly stronger resiliency requirement, and (t, k − 1, n)-agreement, which has a slightly stronger agreement requirement. This is the first partially synchronous system that separates between these sub-consensus problems. The above results show that set timeliness can be used to study and compare the partial synchrony requirements of problems that are strictly weaker than consensus.
doi:10.1145/1582716.1582737 dblp:conf/podc/AguileraDFT09 fatcat:v5qo4357rzhqxmu4a2fckudkf4