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Reversibility with Holes

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Reversible Computation (RC 2024)

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.

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Correspondence to Giovanni Fabbretti .

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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

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62076-8_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-62075-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-62076-8

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