Abstract
Shareable data services providing consistency guarantees, such as atomicity (linearizability), make building distributed systems easier. However, combining linearizability with efficiency in practical algorithms is difficult. A reconfigurable linearizable data service, called Rambo, was developed by Lynch and Shvartsman. This service guarantees consistency under dynamic conditions involving asynchrony, message loss, node crashes, and new node arrivals. The specification of the original algorithm is given at an abstract level aimed at concise presentation and formal reasoning about correctness. The algorithm propagates information by means of gossip messages. If the service is in use for a long time, the size and the number of gossip messages may grow without bound. This paper presents a consistent data service for long-lived objects that improves on Rambo in two ways: it includes an incremental communication protocol and a leave service. The new protocol takes advantage of the local knowledge, and carefully manages the size of messages by removing redundant information, while the leave service allows the nodes to leave the system gracefully. The new algorithm is formally proved correct by forward simulation using levels of abstraction. An experimental implementation of the system was developed for networks-of-workstations. The paper also includes analytical and preliminary empirical results that illustrate the advantages of the new algorithm.
This work is supported in part by the NSF Grants 9984778, 9988304, 0121277, and 0311368.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Special Issue on Group Communication Services. 39(4) of Comm. of the ACM (1996)
Attiya, H., Bar-Noy, A., Dolev, D.: Sharing Memory Robustly in Message Passing Systems. Journal of the ACM 42(1), 124–142 (1996)
Birman, K., Joseph, T.: Exploiting virtual synchrony in distributed systems. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (December 1987)
Englert, B., Shvartsman, A.A.: Graceful quorum reconfiguration in a robust emulation of shared memory. In: Proc. of Inter. Conf. on Dist.d Computer Systems, pp. 454–463 (2000)
Golding, R.A.: Weak-consistency group communication and membership. PhD Thesis, University of California (1992)
Gilbert, S., Lynch, N., Shvartsman, A.A.: RAMBO II: Rapidly reconfigurable atomic memory for dynamic networks. In: Proc. of Inter. Conf. on Dependable Systems and Networks, pp. 259–268 (2003)
Ghorbani, A., Bhavsar, V.: Training artificial neural networks using variable precision incremental communication. In: Proc. of IEEE World Congress On Computational Intelligence, vol. 3, pp. 1409–1414 (1994)
Guy, R.G., Heidemann, J.S., Mak, W., Page Jr., T.W., Popek, G.J., Rothmeier, D.: Implementation of the Ficus Replicated File System. In: Proc. of Summer USENIX Conference, pp. 63–71 (1990)
Lynch, N.A.: Distributed Algorithms. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco (1996)
Lynch, N., Shvartsman, A.A.: RAMBO: A reconfigurable atomic memory service for dynamic networks. In: Proc. of 16th Inter. Symp. on Dist. Comp., pp. 173–190 (2002)
Lynch, N.A., Tuttle, M.: Hierarchical correctness proofs for distributed algorithms. LCS/TR-387, MIT (1987)
Minsky, Y.: Spreading rumors cheaply, quickly, and reliably. Ph.D Thesis, Cornell University (2002)
Rabinovich, M., Gehani, N., Kononov, A.: Efficient update propagation in epidemic replicated databases. In: Proc. of 5th Int. Conf. on Extending Database Tech., pp. 207–222 (1996)
Upfal, E., Wigderson, A.: How to share memory in a distributed system. Journal of the ACM 34(1), 116–127 (1987)
Vitanyi, P., Awerbuch, B.: Atomic shared register access by asynchronous hardware. In: Proc. of 27th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, pp. 233–243 (1986)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Georgiou, C., Musial, P.M., Shvartsman, A.A. (2004). Long-Lived Rambo: Trading Knowledge for Communication. In: Královic̆, R., Sýkora, O. (eds) Structural Information and Communication Complexity. SIROCCO 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3104. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27796-5_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27796-5_17
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-22230-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-27796-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive