Abstract
A significant shortcoming of causal message ordering systems is their inefficiency because of false causality. False causality is the result of the inability of the “happens before” relation to model true causal relationships among events. The ineficiency of causal message ordering algorithms takes the form of additional delays in message delivery and requirements for large message buffers. This paper gives a lightweight causal message ordering algorithm based on a modified “happens before” relation. This lightweight algorithm greatly reduces the inefficiencies that traditional causal message ordering algorithms suffer from, by reducing the problem of false causality.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Y. Amir, D. Dolev, S. Kramer and D. Malki, Transis: A communication sub-system for high-availability, Proc. 22nd International Symposium on Fault-tolerant Computing, IEEE Computer Society Press, 337–346, 1991.
K. Birman, A response to Cheriton and Skeen’s criticism of causal and totally ordered communication, Operating Systems Review, 28(1): 11–21, Jan. 1994.
K. Birman, T. Joseph, Reliable communication in the presence of failures, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 5(1): 47–76, Feb. 1987.
K. Birman, A. Schiper and P. Stephenson, Lightweight causal and atomic group multicast, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 9(3): 272–314, Aug. 1991.
J. Caroll, A. Borshchev, A deterministic model of time for distributed systems, Proc. Eighth IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, 593–598, Oct. 1996.
D.R. Cheriton, D. Skeen, Understanding the limitations of causally and totally ordered communication, Proc. 11th ACM Symposium on the Operating Systems Principles, 44–57, Dec. 1993.
C. Fidge, Logical time in distributed computing systems, IEEE Computer, 24(8): 28–33, Aug. 1991.
P. Gambhire, Efficient Causal Message Ordering, M.S. Thesis, University of Illinois at Chicago, April 2000.
F. Kaashoek, A. Tanenbaum, Group communication in the Ameoba distributed operating system, Proc. Fifth ACM Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 125–136, 1986.
A. Kshemkalyani, M. Singhal, Necessary and sufficient conditions on information for causal message ordering and their optimal implementation, Distributed Computing, 11(2), 91–111, April 1998.
L. Lamport, Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system, Communications of the ACM, 21(7): 558–565, July 1978.
L.L. Peterson, N.C. Bucholz and R.D. Schlichting, Preserving and using context information in interprocess communication, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 7(3), 217–246, 1989.
M. Raynal, A. Schiper, S. Toueg, The causal ordering abstraction and a simple way to implement it, Information Processing Letters 39:343–350, 1991.
L. Rodrigues, P. Verissimo, Causal separators and topological timestamping: an approach to support causal multicast in large-scale systems, Proc. 15th IEEE International Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems, May 1995.
R. van Renesse, Causal controversy at Le Mont St. Michel, Operating Systems Review, 27(2):44–53, April 1993.
A. Schiper, A. Eggli, A. Sandoz, A new algorithm to implement causal ordering, Proc. Third International Workshop on Distributed Systems, Nice, France, LNCS 392, Springer-Verlag, 219–232, 1989.
A. Tarafdar, V. Garg, Addressing false causality while detecting predicates in distributed programs, Proc. 18th IEEE International Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems, 94–101, May 1998.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gambhire, P., Kshemkalyani, A.D. (2000). Reducing False Causality in Causal Message Ordering. In: Valero, M., Prasanna, V.K., Vajapeyam, S. (eds) High Performance Computing — HiPC 2000. HiPC 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1970. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44467-X_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44467-X_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-41429-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44467-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive