Graceful Quorum Reconfiguration in a Robust Emulation of Shared Memory

Providing shared-memory abstraction in messagepassing systems often simplifies the development of distributed algorithms and allows for the reuse of sharedmemory algorithms in the message-passing setting. A robust emulation of atomic single-writer/multi-reader registers in message-passing systems was developed by Attiya, Bar-Noy and Dolev (1995). This emulation was extended by Lynch and Shvartsman (1997) to multi-writer/multi-reader registers using reconfigurable quorum systems. In this work we present a new atomic multi-writer/multi-reader register service that includes a fault-tolerant reconfiguration service. This new emulation has a substantially improved performance and fault-tolerance characteristics. We introduce the concept of intermediate quorum configurations and show how they can be used by readers/writers during reconfiguration. The result is that the quorum reconfigurations are graceful: readers and writers no longer "busy-wait" during reconfigurations, but are ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Burkhard Englert, Alexander A. Shvartsman
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCS 2000, Quorum, Quorum Configuration, Quorum System