Early stopping in Global Data Computation

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 14; no. 9; pp. 909 - 921
• Main Authors: Delporte-Gallet, C., Fauconnier, H., Helary, J.-M., Raynal, M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-09-2003; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE); Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Cognitive science; Computer crashes; Computer science; Contamination; Context modeling; Detectors; Distributed computing; Fault detection; Fault tolerant systems; Protocols; perfect failure detector; fault tolerance; Asynchronous distributed systems; early stopping; reliability; crash failure; distributed computing; global data
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2003.1233713

The Global Data Computation problem consists of providing each process with the same vector (with one entry per process) such that each entry is filled by a value provided by the corresponding process. This paper presents a protocol that solves this problem in an asynchronous distributed system where processes can crash, but equipped with a perfect failure detector. This protocol requires that processes execute asynchronous computation rounds. The number of rounds is upper bounded by min(f+2, t+1, n), where n, t, and f represent the total number of processes, the maximum number of processes that can crash, and the number of processes that actually crash, respectively. This value is a lower bound for the number of rounds when t<n-1. To our knowledge, this protocol is the first to achieve this lower bound. Interestingly, this protocol meets the same lower bound as the one required in synchronous systems.