![]() Fall, 2002 Time: Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30-11:00am Room: 36-155 Credits: 12 (3-0-9) Level: Grad H Enrollment and prerequisites: The course is intended for graduate students interested in doing research in the area of distributed algorithms. From the practical side, it meant that people designing transaction-processing algorithms had to be careful when they described their work, to say how it circumvented the limitation that’s expressed by this impossibility result. 6.895 Advanced Distributed Algorithms, Fall Term 2002 Professor Nancy Lynch. The FLP result shows that, if you have to contend with the possibility of even one processor failing, then it isn't possible for the processors to reliably reach agreement on a decision. At the end of the transaction, which has to be executed in many places in the network, the processors all have to agree: Should they accept the results of the transaction or should they abort the whole thing? At the same time, you have to deal with possibilities of some of the processors failing. This comes up, for example, in the database area where processors are handling or managing data transactions. If you have many processors that want to make a decision, and some have an initial preference of voting “yes,” and some have an initial preference of voting “no,” you want to have them exchange their information and decide one way or the other. ![]() “FLP” is just the authors' initials-Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson-for my best-known paper that we wrote back in 1985, which is called “Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process” ( 1). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |