Uniform actions in asynchronous distributed systems
Dalia Malki, Ken Birman, Aleta M. Ricciardi, André Schiper · 1994
We devetop necessary conditions for the development of asynchronous distributed sofiware that will perform uniform actions (’evenis that if performed by any pro-cess, must be performed at all processes). The pa-per focuses on dynamic uniformity, which differs from ihe classical problems in that processes continually leave and join the ongoing computation. It relates the problem to asynchronous Consensus, and shows that Consensus is a harder problem. We provide a rigorous characterization of the framework upon which several existing distributed programming environments are based. And, our work shows that progress is some-times possible in a primary-partition model even when consensus is not. 1