Using Time Instead of Timeout for Fault-Tolerant Distributed Systems
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems | , pp. 254-280
The genesis of this paper was my realization that, in a multiprocess system with synchronized clocks, the absence of a message can carry information. I was fascinated by the idea that a process could communicating zillions of bits of information by not sending messages. The practical implementation of Byzantine generals algorithms described in [46] could be viewed as an application of this idea. I used the idea as something of a gimmick to justify the paper. The basic message of this paper should have been pretty obvious: the state machine approach, introduced in [27], allows us to turn any consensus algorithm into a general method for implementing distributed systems; the Byzantine generals algorithms of [46] were fault-tolerant consensus algorithms; hence, we had fault-tolerant implementations of arbitrary distributed systems. I published the paper because I had found few computer scientists who understood this.
Copyright © 1984 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or [email protected]. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library --http://www.acm.org/dl/.