Implementing distributed computing abstractions in the presence of churn
Silvia Bonomi · OpenGrey (Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique) · 2010
The focus of this thesis is on the analysis of issues arising from considering distributed shared object abstractions in a distributed system where processes continuously join and leave the computation. The interests of shared objects lies in the fact that they are very powerful abstractions, provided to distributed system developers, due to their ability to allow inter-process communication by hiding all the complexity following from the message-exchange behind their implementation. In static distributed systems, the weaker conditions that make possible the implementation of a shared object are well known. The same is not true, moving towards a dynamic system prone to continuous churn. In this thesis, we try to take a step towards the definition of algorithms, implementing shared objects, and bounds on the dynamicity ensuring protocols to remain correct. Two shared object abstractions have been considered (i) a regular register and (ii) a set object.