Abstract of Paper Accepted to PODC 2000

Indulgent Algorithms

Rachid Guerraoui

To appear at Nineteenth Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on PRINCIPLES OF DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING (PODC 2000), Portland, Oregon, 16-19 July 2000

Abstract

Informally, an indulgent algorithm is a distributed algorithm that tolerates unreliable failure detection: the algorithm is indulgent towards its failure detector. This paper formally characterizes such algorithms and states some of their interesting features. We show that indulgent algorithms are inherently safe and uniform. We also state impossibility results for indulgent solutions to divergent problems like consensus, and failure-sensitive problems like non-blocking atomic commit and terminating reliable broadcast.