Abstract
We examine algorithmic issues associated with view-synchronous communication (VSC) group membership in large-scale distributed systems where network partitions may result in multiple views to be active concurrently. We first derive necessary conditions on the partial order of installed views such that VSC is meaningful and solvable in the presence of partitions. We then prove that strong-partial VSC, which guarantees concurrent views to be disjoint, is not easier than atomic commitment. As such, all know lower bound results for atomic commitment are also lower bounds for this problem, including the impossibility of non-blocking solutions in the presence of communication failures. We discuss the practical implications of our results in constructing group communication facilities for large-scale distributed systems.
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This work has been supported in part by the Commission of European Communities under ESPRIT Programme Basic Research Project 6360 (BROADCAST), the Italian National Research Council and the Italian Ministry of University, Research and Technology.
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Babaoğlu, Ö., Davoli, R., Giachini, L., Sabattini, P. (1995). The inherent cost of strong-partial view-synchronous communication. In: Hélary, JM., Raynal, M. (eds) Distributed Algorithms. WDAG 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 972. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0022139
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0022139
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