4,516 research outputs found
Analysis of Bounds on Hybrid Vector Clocks
Hybrid vector clocks (HVC) implement vector clocks (VC) in a space-efficient manner by exploiting the availability of loosely-synchronized physical clocks at each node. In this paper, we develop a model for determining the bounds on the size of HVC. Our model uses four parameters, epsilon: uncertainty window, delta: minimum message delay, alpha: communication frequency and n: number of nodes in the system. We derive the size of HVC in terms of a differential equation, and show that the size predicted by our model is almost identical to the results obtained by simulation. We also identify closed form solutions that provide tight lower and upper bounds for useful special cases.
Our model and simulations show the HVC size is a sigmoid function with respect to increasing epsilon; it has a slow start but it grows exponentially after a phase transition. We present equations to identify the phase transition point and show that for many practical applications and deployment environments, the size of HVC remains only as a couple entries and substantially less than n. We also find that, in a model with random unicast message transmissions, increasing n actually helps for reducing HVC size
Preserving Stabilization while Practically Bounding State Space
Stabilization is a key dependability property for dealing with unanticipated
transient faults, as it guarantees that even in the presence of such faults,
the system will recover to states where it satisfies its specification. One of
the desirable attributes of stabilization is the use of bounded space for each
variable. In this paper, we present an algorithm that transforms a stabilizing
program that uses variables with unbounded domain into a stabilizing program
that uses bounded variables and (practically bounded) physical time. While
non-stabilizing programs (that do not handle transient faults) can deal with
unbounded variables by assigning large enough but bounded space, stabilizing
programs that need to deal with arbitrary transient faults cannot do the same
since a transient fault may corrupt the variable to its maximum value. We show
that our transformation algorithm is applicable to several problems including
logical clocks, vector clocks, mutual exclusion, leader election, diffusing
computations, Paxos based consensus, and so on. Moreover, our approach can also
be used to bound counters used in an earlier work by Katz and Perry for adding
stabilization to a non-stabilizing program. By combining our algorithm with
that earlier work by Katz and Perry, it would be possible to provide
stabilization for a rich class of problems, by assigning large enough but
bounded space for variables.Comment: Moved some content from the Appendix to the main paper, added some
details to the transformation algorithm and to its descriptio
Re-verification of a Lip Synchronization Protocol using Robust Reachability
The timed automata formalism is an important model for specifying and
analysing real-time systems. Robustness is the correctness of the model in the
presence of small drifts on clocks or imprecision in testing guards. A symbolic
algorithm for the analysis of the robustness of timed automata has been
implemented. In this paper, we re-analyse an industrial case lip
synchronization protocol using the new robust reachability algorithm. This lip
synchronization protocol is an interesting case because timing aspects are
crucial for the correctness of the protocol. Several versions of the model are
considered: with an ideal video stream, with anchored jitter, and with
non-anchored jitter
Re-verification of a Lip Synchronization Algorithm using robust reachability
The timed automata formalism is an important model for specifying and analysing real-time systems. Robustness is the correctness of the model in the presence of small drifts on clocks or imprecision in testing guards. A symbolic algorithm for the analysis of the robustness of timed automata has been implemented. In this paper we re-analyse an industrial case lip synchronization protocol using the new robust reachability algorithm.This lip synchronization protocol is an interesting case because timing aspect are crucial for the correctness of the protocol. Several versions of the model are considered, with an ideal video stream, with anchored jitter, and with non-anchored jitter
Okapi: Causally Consistent Geo-Replication Made Faster, Cheaper and More Available
Okapi is a new causally consistent geo-replicated key- value store. Okapi
leverages two key design choices to achieve high performance. First, it relies
on hybrid logical/physical clocks to achieve low latency even in the presence
of clock skew. Second, Okapi achieves higher resource efficiency and better
availability, at the expense of a slight increase in update visibility latency.
To this end, Okapi implements a new stabilization protocol that uses a
combination of vector and scalar clocks and makes a remote update visible when
its delivery has been acknowledged by every data center. We evaluate Okapi with
different workloads on Amazon AWS, using three geographically distributed
regions and 96 nodes. We compare Okapi with two recent approaches to causal
consistency, Cure and GentleRain. We show that Okapi delivers up to two orders
of magnitude better performance than GentleRain and that Okapi achieves up to
3.5x lower latency and a 60% reduction of the meta-data overhead with respect
to Cure
Monitoring Partially Synchronous Distributed Systems using SMT Solvers
In this paper, we discuss the feasibility of monitoring partially synchronous
distributed systems to detect latent bugs, i.e., errors caused by concurrency
and race conditions among concurrent processes. We present a monitoring
framework where we model both system constraints and latent bugs as
Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) formulas, and we detect the presence of
latent bugs using an SMT solver. We demonstrate the feasibility of our
framework using both synthetic applications where latent bugs occur at any time
with random probability and an application involving exclusive access to a
shared resource with a subtle timing bug. We illustrate how the time required
for verification is affected by parameters such as communication frequency,
latency, and clock skew. Our results show that our framework can be used for
real-life applications, and because our framework uses SMT solvers, the range
of appropriate applications will increase as these solvers become more
efficient over time.Comment: Technical Report corresponding to the paper accepted at Runtime
Verification (RV) 201
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