Less is more: Consensus gaps between restricted and unrestricted objects

Yehuda Afek*, Eran Shalom

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

What characteristics of an object determine its consensus number? Here we analyze how the consensus power of various objects changes without changing their functionality, but by placing certain restrictions on the object usage. For example it is shown that the consensus number of either a bounded-use queue or stack is 3 while the consensus number of the long-lived bounded-size and unbounded-size versions of either is 2. Similarly we show that the consensus number of restricted versions of Fetch & Add, Swap and Set are infinite (n) while for the unrestricted counterparts it is 2. This paper thus underlines the fact that the consensus number of an object reflects the amount of coordination required in the object implementation and not by its capacity. That is, the more corners, broken edges, and other hard limitations placed on an object, the higher its consensus number tends to be.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationDistributed Computing - 20th International Symposium, DISC 2006, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages209-223
Number of pages15
ISBN (Print)3540446249, 9783540446248
DOIs
StatePublished - 2006
Event20th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, DISC 2006 - Stockholm, Sweden
Duration: 18 Sep 200620 Sep 2006

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume4167 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference20th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, DISC 2006
Country/TerritorySweden
CityStockholm
Period18/09/0620/09/06

Keywords

  • Bounded-size
  • Bounded-use
  • Common2
  • Consensus hierarchy
  • Fetch&Add
  • Long-lived
  • Queues
  • Set
  • Stacks
  • Swap
  • Wait-free

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