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Encyclopedia of Algorithms pp 724–728Cite as

Failure Detectors

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:

  • 127 Accesses

Years and Authors of Summarized Original Work

  • 1996; Chandra, Toueg

Problem Definition

A distributed system is comprised of a collection of processes. The processes typically seek to achieve some common task by communicating through message passing or shared memory. Most interesting tasks require, at least at certain points of the computation, some form of agreement between the processes. An abstract form of such agreement is consensus where processes need to agree on a single value among a set of proposed values. Solving this seemingly elementary problem is at the heart of reliable distributed computing and, in particular, of distributed database commitment, total ordering of messages, and emulations of many shared object types.

Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson's seminal result in the theory of distributed computing [13] says that consensus cannot be deterministically solved in an asynchronousdistributed system that is prone to process failures. This impossibility holds consequently for...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Rachid Guerraoui

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  1. Rachid Guerraoui
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Correspondence to Rachid Guerraoui .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Ming-Yang Kao

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Guerraoui, R. (2016). Failure Detectors. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2864-4_140

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