Task Computability in Unreliable Anonymous Networks

We consider the anonymous broadcast model: a set of n anonymous processes communicate via send-to-all primitives. We assume that underlying communication channels are asynchronous but reliable, and that the processes are subject to crash failures. We show first that in this model, even a single faulty process precludes implementations of atomic objects with non-commuting operations, even as simple as read-write registers or add-only sets. We, however, show that a sequentially consistent read-write memory and add-only sets can be implemented t-resiliently for t<n/2, i.e., provided that a majority of the processes do not fail. We use this implementation to establish an equivalence between the t-resilient read-write anonymous shared-memory model and the t-resilient anonymous broadcast model in terms of colorless task solvability. As a result, we obtain the first task computability characterization for unreliable anonymous message-passing systems