Dynamic Vector Clocks for Consistent Ordering of Events in Dynamic Distributed Applications.
Tobias Landes · Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications · 2006
A large number of tasks in distributed systems can be traced down to the fundamental problem of attaining a consistent global view on a distributed computation. This problem is commonly solved by appliance of vector clocks as a means of tracing causal dependencies among the events that characterize a run of the computation. In the paper at hand an extension to the concept of vector clocks is presented and examined that is meant to overcome the vector clocks’ great drawback: that the number of processes in the distributed system has to be constant and known in advance. As an appropriate context for these dynamic vector clocks and their associated algorithms to be integrated into, scalar and vector clocks are analogously reinvestigated.