Recoverable Consensus in Shared Memory

• Main Author: Golab, Wojciech
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 27-04-2018
• Subjects: Computer Science - Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1804.10597

Herlihy's consensus hierarchy ranks the power of various synchronization
primitives for solving consensus in a model where asynchronous processes
communicate through shared memory and fail by halting. This paper revisits the
consensus hierarchy in a model with crash-recovery failures, where the
specification of consensus, called \emph{recoverable consensus} in this paper,
is weakened by allowing non-terminating executions when a process fails
infinitely often. Two variations of this model are considered: independent
failures, and simultaneous (i.e., system-wide) failures. Several results are
proved in this model: (i) We prove that any primitive at level two of Herlihy's
hierarchy remains at level two if simultaneous crash-recovery failures are
introduced. This is accomplished by transforming (one instance of) any
2-process conventional consensus algorithm to a 2-process recoverable consensus
algorithm. (ii) For any $n > 1$ and $f > 0$, we show how to use $f+1$ instances
of any conventional $n$-process consensus algorithm and $\Theta(f + n)$
read/write registers to solve $n$-process recoverable consensus when
crash-recovery failures are independent, assuming that every execution contains
at most $f$ such failures. (iii) Next, we prove for any $f > 0$ that any
2-process recoverable consensus algorithm that uses TAS and read/writer
registers requires at least $f+1$ TAS objects, assuming that crash-recovery
failures are independent and every execution contains at most $f$ such
failures. (iv) Lastly, we generalize and strengthen (iii) by proving that any
universal construction of $n$-process recoverable consensus from a type $T$
with consensus number $n$ and read/write registers requires at least $f+1$ base
objects of type $T$ in executions with up to $f$ failures.