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The Alpha of Indulgent Consensus

Guerraoui, Rachid ; Raynal, Michel

In: The Computer Journal, 2007, vol. 50, no. 1, p. 53-67

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    Title
    • The Alpha of Indulgent Consensus
    Author
    • Guerraoui, Rachid. Distributed Programming Lab., EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland
    • Raynal, Michel. IRISA, Campus de Beaulieu 35042 Rennes Cedex, France
    Document Type
    • Postprint
    Language
    • English
    Published in
    • The Computer Journal, 2007, vol. 50, no. 1, p. 53-67. Oxford University Press
    Other Version
    OAI-PMH Identifier
    • oai:doc.rero.ch:294301
    Summary
    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