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The Computer Journal Advance Access originally published online on August 3, 2006
The Computer Journal 2007 50(1):53-67; doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxl046
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Alpha of Indulgent Consensus

Rachid Guerraoui1 and Michel Raynal2,*

1 Distributed Programming Lab., EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland
2 IRISA, Campus de Beaulieu 35042 Rennes Cedex, France

*Corresponding author: michel.raynal{at}irisa.fr

This paper presents a simple framework unifying a family of consensus algorithms that can tolerate process crash failures and asynchronous periods of the network, also called indulgent consensus algorithms. Key to the framework is a new abstraction we introduce here, called Alpha, and which precisely captures consensus safety. Implementations of Alpha in shared memory, storage area network, message passing and active disk systems are presented, leading to directly derived consensus algorithms suited to these communication media. The paper also considers the case where the number of processes is unknown and can be arbitrarily large.

Key Words: asynchronous system • disk • consensus • message-passing • shared memory


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