A Survey of Techniques for Synchronization and Recovery in Decentralized Computer Systems
Walter H. Kohler · ACM Computing Surveys · 1981
Two related and fundamental problems in designing decentralized systems which support an object model of computation are introduced, and proposed solution techniques are surveyed The first problem is synchronizing access to shared objects while allowing a high degree of concurrency.The second is the recovery of objects in spite of user errors, application errors, or partial system failure.The synchronization problem is a general~.atmn of the concurrency control problem which arises in database and transaction-processing systems.Concurrency control methods which use locking, timestamps, mrculatmg permit, tickets, conflict analysis, and reservations are presented and compared.The proposed approach to solving the recovery problem is based on a software structuring abstraction called the atonuc action, a type of generalized transaction.Requirements and techniques for implementing atomic actions in a decentralized environment are discussed.