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Silence

Published: 29 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The cost of communication is a substantial factor affecting the scalability of many distributed applications. Every message sent can incur a cost in storage, computation, energy, and bandwidth. Consequently, reducing the communication costs of distributed applications is highly desirable. The best way to reduce message costs is by communicating without sending any messages whatsoever. This article initiates a rigorous investigation into the use of silence in synchronous settings, in which processes can fail. We formalize sufficient conditions for information transfer using silence, as well as necessary conditions for particular cases of interest. This allows us to identify message patterns that enable communication through silence. In particular, a pattern called a silent choir is identified, and shown to be central to information transfer via silence in failure-prone systems. The power of the new framework is demonstrated on the atomic commitment problem (AC). A complete characterization of the tradeoff between message complexity and round complexity in the synchronous model with crash failures is provided, in terms of lower bounds and matching protocols. In particular, a new message-optimal AC protocol is designed using silence, in which processes decide in three rounds in the common case. This significantly improves on the best previously known message-optimal AC protocol, in which decisions were performed in Θ(n) rounds.
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
Paul Simon, 1964

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  • (2024)Simplicial models for the epistemic logic of faulty agentsBoletín de la Sociedad Matemática Mexicana10.1007/s40590-024-00656-x30:3Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
  • (2022)Unbeatable consensusDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-021-00417-335:2(123-143)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2022
  • (2021)Optimistically tuning synchronous byzantine consensus: another win for null messagesDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-021-00393-834:5(395-410)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2021

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Published In

cover image Journal of the ACM
Journal of the ACM  Volume 67, Issue 1
February 2020
265 pages
ISSN:0004-5411
EISSN:1557-735X
DOI:10.1145/3379978
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 January 2020
Accepted: 01 December 2019
Revised: 01 August 2019
Received: 01 November 2018
Published in JACM Volume 67, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Silent information exchange
  2. atomic commitment
  3. consensus
  4. fault-tolerance
  5. knowledge
  6. null messages
  7. optimality
  8. silent choir

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Simplicial models for the epistemic logic of faulty agentsBoletín de la Sociedad Matemática Mexicana10.1007/s40590-024-00656-x30:3Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
  • (2022)Unbeatable consensusDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-021-00417-335:2(123-143)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2022
  • (2021)Optimistically tuning synchronous byzantine consensus: another win for null messagesDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-021-00393-834:5(395-410)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2021

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