Abstract
According to Landauer’s principle, any non-reversible system can be made reversible -that is, capable of undoing its actions- by keeping information about the past of the computation. In the area of concurrent and distributed systems, this often takes the form of memories. Memories are special devices that keep track of past states of a system execution. Memories can be looked up to restore past states, upon necessity. This paper investigates and lays down ideas on how to achieve reversibility in systems that are subject to events that, as a side effect, erase some memories, creating then holes in the structure of memories. The chosen application area is concurrent and distributed systems, where the events erasing memories are the failure of nodes.
The work has been partially supported by French ANR project DCore ANR-18-CE25-0007. The second author has also been partially supported by MSCA-PF project 101106046 - ReGraDe-CS and by INdAM – GNCS 2023 project RISICO, code CUP_E53C22001930001. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Danos, V., Krivine, J.: Reversible communicating systems. In: Gardner, P., Yoshida, N. (eds.) CONCUR 2004. LNCS, vol. 3170, pp. 292–307. Springer, Heidelberg (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-28644-8_19
Elnozahy, E.N.: Manetho: fault tolerance in distributed systems using rollback-recovery and process replication. Ph.D. thesis, Rice University (1993)
Elnozahy, E.N., Zwaenepoel, W.: Manetho: transparent roll back-recovery with low overhead, limited rollback, and fast output commit. IEEE Trans. Comput. 41(5), 526–531 (1992)
Fabbretti, G., Lanese, I., Stefani, J.-B.: A behavioral theory for crash failures and Erlang-style recoveries in distributed systems. Technical report RR-9511, Inria (2023)
Landauer, R.: Irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process. IBM J. Res. Dev. 5(3), 183–191 (1961)
Lanese, I., Mezzina, C.A., Schmitt, A., Stefani, J.-B.: Controlling reversibility in higher-order pi. In: Katoen, J.-P., König, B. (eds.) CONCUR 2011. LNCS, vol. 6901, pp. 297–311. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23217-6_20
Lanese, I., Mezzina, C.A., Stefani, J.-B.: Reversibility in the higher-order \(\pi \)-calculus. Theor. Comput. Sci. 625, 25–84 (2016)
Lanese, I., Nishida, N., Palacios, A., Vidal, G.: A theory of reversibility for Erlang. J. Log. Algebraic Methods Program. 100, 71–97 (2018)
Phillips, I., Ulidowski, I.: Reversing algebraic process calculi. J. Log. Algebraic Methods Program. 73(1–2), 70–96 (2007)
Phillips, I., Ulidowski, I., Yuen, S.: A Reversible process calculus and the modelling of the ERK signalling pathway. In: Glück, R., Yokoyama, T. (eds.) RC 2012. LNCS, vol. 7581, pp. 218–232. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36315-3_18
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Fabbretti, G., Lanese, I., Stefani, JB. (2024). Reversibility with Holes. In: Mogensen, T.Æ., Mikulski, Ł. (eds) Reversible Computation. RC 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14680. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62076-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62076-8_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-62075-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-62076-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)