Premium
Open consensus
Author(s) -
Boichat Romain,
Frølund Svend,
Guerraoui Rachid
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.594
Subject(s) - computer science , asynchronous communication , abstraction , protocol (science) , java , modular design , distributed computing , overhead (engineering) , consensus , programming language , computer network , multi agent system , artificial intelligence , medicine , philosophy , alternative medicine , epistemology , pathology
This paper presents the abstraction of open consensus and argues for its use as an effective component for building reliable agreement protocols in practical asynchronous systems where processes and links can crash and recover. The specification of open consensus has a decoupled, on‐demand and re‐entrant flavour that make its use very efficient, especially in terms of forced logs, which are known to be major sources of overhead in distributed systems. We illustrate the use of open consensus as a basic building block to develop a modular, yet efficient, total‐order broadcast protocol. Finally, we describe our Java implementation of our open‐consensus abstraction and we convey our efficiency claims through some practical performance measures. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.