38 research outputs found
The Benefits of Entropy in Population Protocols
A distributed computing system can be viewed as the result of the interplay between a distributed algorithm specifying the effects of a local event (e.g. reception of a message), and an adversary choosing the interleaving (schedule) of these events in the execution. In the context of large networks of mobile pairwise interacting agents (population protocols), the adversary models the mobility of the agents by choosing the successive pairs of interacting agents. For some problems, assuming that the adversary selects the schedule according to some probability distribution greatly helps to devise (almost) correct solutions. But how much randomness is really necessary? To what extent does a problem admit implementations that are robust against a "not so random" schedule? This paper takes a first step in addressing this question by borrowing the concept of T-randomness, 0 <= T <= 1, from algorithmic information theory. Roughly speaking, the value T fixes the entropy rate of the considered schedules. For instance, the case T = 1 corresponds, in a specific sense, to schedules in which the pairs of interacting agents are chosen independently and uniformly (perfect randomness). The holy grail question can then be precisely stated as determining the optimal entropy rate to solve a given problem. We first show that perfect randomness is never required. Precisely, if a finite-state algorithm solves a problem with 1-randomness, then this algorithm still solves the same problem with T-randomness for some T < 1. Second, we illustrate how to compute bounds on the optimal entropy rate of a specific problem, namely the leader election problem
Reliable Broadcast despite Mobile Byzantine Faults
We investigate the solvability of the Byzantine Reliable Broadcast and
Byzantine Broadcast Channel problems in distributed systems affected by Mobile
Byzantine Faults. We show that both problems are not solvable even in one of
the most constrained system models for mobile Byzantine faults defined so far.
By endowing processes with an additional local failure oracle, we provide a
solution to the Byzantine Broadcast Channel problem
Checking Linearizability of Concurrent Priority Queues
Efficient implementations of concurrent objects such as atomic collections
are essential to modern computing. Programming such objects is error prone: in
minimizing the synchronization overhead between concurrent object invocations,
one risks the conformance to sequential specifications -- or in formal terms,
one risks violating linearizability. Unfortunately, verifying linearizability
is undecidable in general, even on classes of implementations where the usual
control-state reachability is decidable. In this work we consider concurrent
priority queues which are fundamental to many multi-threaded applications such
as task scheduling or discrete event simulation, and show that verifying
linearizability of such implementations can be reduced to control-state
reachability. This reduction entails the first decidability results for
verifying concurrent priority queues in the context of an unbounded number of
threads, and it enables the application of existing safety-verification tools
for establishing their correctness.Comment: An extended abstract is published in the Proceedings of CONCUR 201
Optimal Dynamic Distributed MIS
Finding a maximal independent set (MIS) in a graph is a cornerstone task in
distributed computing. The local nature of an MIS allows for fast solutions in
a static distributed setting, which are logarithmic in the number of nodes or
in their degrees. The result trivially applies for the dynamic distributed
model, in which edges or nodes may be inserted or deleted. In this paper, we
take a different approach which exploits locality to the extreme, and show how
to update an MIS in a dynamic distributed setting, either \emph{synchronous} or
\emph{asynchronous}, with only \emph{a single adjustment} and in a single
round, in expectation. These strong guarantees hold for the \emph{complete
fully dynamic} setting: Insertions and deletions, of edges as well as nodes,
gracefully and abruptly. This strongly separates the static and dynamic
distributed models, as super-constant lower bounds exist for computing an MIS
in the former.
Our results are obtained by a novel analysis of the surprisingly simple
solution of carefully simulating the greedy \emph{sequential} MIS algorithm
with a random ordering of the nodes. As such, our algorithm has a direct
application as a -approximation algorithm for correlation clustering. This
adds to the important toolbox of distributed graph decompositions, which are
widely used as crucial building blocks in distributed computing.
Finally, our algorithm enjoys a useful \emph{history-independence} property,
meaning the output is independent of the history of topology changes that
constructed that graph. This means the output cannot be chosen, or even biased,
by the adversary in case its goal is to prevent us from optimizing some
objective function.Comment: 19 pages including appendix and reference
DINOMO: An Elastic, Scalable, High-Performance Key-Value Store for Disaggregated Persistent Memory (Extended Version)
We present Dinomo, a novel key-value store for disaggregated persistent
memory (DPM). Dinomo is the first key-value store for DPM that simultaneously
achieves high common-case performance, scalability, and lightweight online
reconfiguration. We observe that previously proposed key-value stores for DPM
had architectural limitations that prevent them from achieving all three goals
simultaneously. Dinomo uses a novel combination of techniques such as ownership
partitioning, disaggregated adaptive caching, selective replication, and
lock-free and log-free indexing to achieve these goals. Compared to a
state-of-the-art DPM key-value store, Dinomo achieves at least 3.8x better
throughput on various workloads at scale and higher scalability, while
providing fast reconfiguration.Comment: This is an extended version of the full paper to appear in PVLDB
15.13 (VLDB 2023
Distributed eventual leader election in the crash-recovery and general omission failure models.
102 p.Distributed applications are present in many aspects of everyday life. Banking, healthcare or transportation are examples of such applications. These applications are built on top of distributed systems. Roughly speaking, a distributed system is composed of a set of processes that collaborate among them to achieve a common goal. When building such systems, designers have to cope with several issues, such as different synchrony assumptions and failure occurrence. Distributed systems must ensure that the delivered service is trustworthy.Agreement problems compose a fundamental class of problems in distributed systems. All agreement problems follow the same pattern: all processes must agree on some common decision. Most of the agreement problems can be considered as a particular instance of the Consensus problem. Hence, they can be solved by reduction to consensus. However, a fundamental impossibility result, namely (FLP), states that in an asynchronous distributed system it is impossible to achieve consensus deterministically when at least one process may fail. A way to circumvent this obstacle is by using unreliable failure detectors. A failure detector allows to encapsulate synchrony assumptions of the system, providing (possibly incorrect) information about process failures. A particular failure detector, called Omega, has been shown to be the weakest failure detector for solving consensus with a majority of correct processes. Informally, Omega lies on providing an eventual leader election mechanism