On the weakest failure detector ever
Rachid Guerraoui, Maurice P. Herlihy, Petr Kouznetsov, Nancy Ann Lynch, Calvin C. Newport · 2007
Many problems in distributed computing are impossible when no information about process failures is available. It is common to ask what information about failures is necessary and sufficient to circumvent some specific impossibility, e.g., consensus, atomic commit, mutual exclusion, etc. This paper asks what information about failures is needed to circumvent any impossibility and sufficient to circumvent some impossibility. In other words, what is the minimal yet non-trivial failure informatio.