On termination detection in crash-prone distributed systems with failure detectors

We investigate the problem of detecting termination of a distributed computation in systems where processes can fail by crashing. Specifically, when the communication topology is fully connected, we describe a way to transform any termination detection algorithm A that has been designed for a failure-free environment into a termination detection algorithm B that can tolerate process crashes. Our transformation assumes the existence of a perfect failure detector. We show that a perfect failure detector is in fact necessary to solve the termination detection problem in a crash-prone distributed system even if at most one process can crash. Let

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: JPDC
• Authors: Neeraj Mittal, Felix C. Freiling, Subbarayan Venkatesan, Lucia Draque Penso
• Keywords: JPDC 2008, Message Complexity, Termination Detection, Termination Detection Algorithm