A review on DISC 2005, the 19th International Symposium on Distributed Computing

DISC is an international symposium on the theory, design, analysis, implementation and application of distributed systems and networks. The well-known International Symposium on Distributed Computing is organized annually in cooperation with the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). This is a review on the 19th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, which took place in Kraków, Poland, on September 26--29, 2005. The proceedings of DISC 2005 are published by Springer, as volume 3724 of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. The conference website can be found at www.mimuw.edu.pl/~disc2005.Postprint (published version

Plausible clocks with bounded inaccuracy

Abstract. In a distributed system with N processes, time stamps of size N (such as vector clocks) are necessary to accurately track potential causality between events. Plausible clocks are a family of time-stamping schemes that use smaller time stamps at the expense of some accuracy. To date, all plausible clocks have been designed to use fixed-sized time stamps, and the inaccuracy of these schemes varies from run to run. In this paper, we define a new metric, imprecision, that formally characterizes the fidelity of a plausible clock. We present a new plausible clock system that guarantees an arbitrary constant bound on imprecision. This bound is achieved by allowing time stamps to grow and shrink over the course of the computation. We verify the correctness of our algorithm, present results of a simulation study, and evaluate its performance.