Proactive Leader Election in Asynchronous Shared Memory Systems

Abstract. In this paper, we give an algorithm for fault-tolerant proactive leader election in asynchronous shared memory systems, and later its formal verification. Roughly speaking, a leader election algorithm is proactive if it can tolerate failure of nodes even after a leader is elected, and (stable) leader election happens periodically. This is needed in systems where a leader is required after every failure to ensure the availability of the system and there might be no explicit events such as messages in the (shared memory) system. Previous algorithms like DiskPaxos[1] are not proactive. In our model, individual nodes can fail and reincarnate at any point in time. Each node has a counter which is incremented every period, which is same across all the nodes (modulo a maximum drift). Different nodes can be in different epochs at the same time. Our algorithm ensures that per epoch there can be at most one leader. So if the counter values of some set of nodes match, then there can be ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ATVA
• Authors: M. C. Dharmadeep, K. Gopinath
• Keywords: ATVA 2006, Hardware, Leader Election, Proactive Leader Election, Shared Memory