Abstract
This paper introduces two benign failure models for shared memory in distributed systems, crash-omission and crash-eventual. These models are of intermediate power between the crash model and omission models of [JCT92]. (They exhibit more faulty behaviors than crash and fewer than omission.) Unlike the crash model, crash-omission is shown to have universal, gracefully-degrading constructions. That is, for any integer k, any shared object may be constructed from shared registers and consensus objects, so that: (1) if no more than k of the components suffer crash-omission failures, the constructed object exhibits no failures, and (2) if more than k of the components suffer crash-omission failures, the constructed object exhibits crash-omission failures.
Simple constructions also demonstrate that registers and consensus objects in the (apparently) less benign crash-eventual model can be used to construct corresponding objects in the crash-omission model.
These results are cited as evidence that the crash-omission failure model may be an appropriate choice to consider in the formulation of a more extensive theory of fault-tolerant shared objects.
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Afek, Y., Merritt, M., Taubenfeld, G. (1993). Benign failure models for shared memory. In: Schiper, A. (eds) Distributed Algorithms. WDAG 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 725. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57271-6_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57271-6_28
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