Understanding Partitions and the No Partition Assumption

Abstract

The paper discusses partitions is asynchronous message-passing systems. In such systems slow processes and slow links can lead to virtual partitions that indistinguishable from real ones. This raises the following question: what is a partition in an asynchronous system? To overcome the impossibility of detecting crashed processes in an asynchronous system, our system model incorporates a failure suspector to detect (possibly erroneously) process failures. Based on failure suspicions we give a definition of partitions that accounts for real partitions as well as virtual ones. We show that under certain assumptions about the process behavior, any incorrect failure suspicion inevitably partitions the system. Wethen show how to interpret the absence of partition assumption

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 1993
Accession Number
ADA266296

Entities

People

  • Aleta Ricciardi
  • Andre Schiper
  • Ken Birman

Organizations

  • Cornell University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Algorithms
  • Asynchronous Systems
  • Classification
  • Computations
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Consistency
  • Contracts
  • Damage Detection
  • Data Management
  • Detection
  • Distributed Computing
  • Fault Tolerance
  • Monitoring
  • Security
  • Universities

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Applied Combinatorial Optimization and Logic Circuit Design.
  • Educational Psychology
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.