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The Quorum Deployment Problem

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Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 3544))

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Abstract

Quorum systems are commonly used to maintain the consistency of replicated data in a distributed system. Much research has been devoted to developing quorum systems with good theoretical properties, such as fault tolerance and high availability. However, even given a theoretically good quorum system, it is not obvious how to efficiently deploy such a system in a real network. This paper introduces a new combinatorial optimization problem, the Quorum Deployment Problem, and studies its complexity. We demonstrate that it is NP-hard to approximate the Quorum Deployment Problem within any factor of n δ, where n is the number of nodes in the distributed network and δ > 0. The problem is NP-hard in even the simplest possible distributed network: a one-dimensional line with metric cost. We begin to study algorithms for variants of the problem. Some variants can be solved optimally in polynomial time and some NP-hard variants can be approximated to within a constant factor.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Seth Gilbert

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

    Grzegorz Malewicz

Authors
  1. Seth Gilbert
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  2. Grzegorz Malewicz
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Japan Science Technology and Agency, CREST, Japan

    Teruo Higashino

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Gilbert, S., Malewicz, G. (2005). The Quorum Deployment Problem. In: Higashino, T. (eds) Principles of Distributed Systems. OPODIS 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3544. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11516798_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11516798_23

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-27324-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31584-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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