Better Sooner Rather Than Later
Ana\"is Durand, Michel Raynal, Gadi Taubenfeld

TL;DR
This paper unifies fundamental results in asynchronous crash-prone distributed computing, showing how failure tolerance varies with failure timing, from impossibility to mutual exclusion, depending on when failures occur.
Contribution
It generalizes and unifies key distributed computing results, linking failure timing with solvability of consensus and mutual exclusion in asynchronous systems.
Findings
Failure tolerance depends on failure timing in distributed algorithms.
The results connect FLP impossibility and Dijkstra's mutual exclusion as special cases.
More failures can be tolerated if they occur earlier in the computation.
Abstract
This article unifies and generalizes fundamental results related to -process asynchronous crash-prone distributed computing. More precisely, it proves that for every , assuming that process failures occur only before the number of participating processes bypasses a predefined threshold that equals (a participating process is a process that has executed at least one statement of its code), an asynchronous algorithm exists that solves consensus for processes in the presence of crash failures if and only if . In a very simple and interesting way, the "extreme" case boils down to the celebrated FLP impossibility result (1985, 1987). Moreover, the second extreme case, namely , captures the celebrated mutual exclusion result by E.W. Dijkstra (1965) that states that mutual exclusion can be solved for processes in an asynchronous…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDistributed systems and fault tolerance · Optimization and Search Problems · Advanced Data Storage Technologies
