Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony (Preliminary Version).

Abstract

The problem of reaching agreement among separated processors is of fundamental importance to distributed computing, and has provided a rich set of interesting mathematical problems. Previous work has shown that if communication and processing are synchronous there exist consensus protocols resilient to large numbers of failures, the exact number depending on the particular type of faulty behavior to be tolerated. In contrast it has been shown that if either communication or processing are asynchronous, then there is no consensus protocol resilient to even one failure of the weakest type. This paper defines and studies the consensus problem in practically motivated situations which lie between the completely synchronous and the completely asynchronous cases. Additional keywords: Byzantine agreement; fault-tolerance and distributed algorithms. (Author).

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 1984
Accession Number
ADA154705

Entities

People

  • C. Dwork
  • L. Stockmeyer
  • N. Lynch

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Human Systems

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  • Distributed Computing
  • Failure Mode And Effect Analysis
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