Understanding distributed computing is not an easy task. This is due to the many facets of uncertainty one has to cope with and master in order to produce correct distributed software. Considering the uncertainty created by asynchrony and process crash failures in the context of message-passing systems, the book focuses on the main abstractions that one has to understand and master in order to be able to produce software with guaranteed properties. These fundamental abstractions are communication abstractions that allow the processes to communicate consistently (namely the register abstraction and the reliable broadcast abstraction), and the consensus agreement abstractions that allows them to cooperate despite failures. As they give a precise meaning to the words "communicate" and "agree" despite asynchrony and failures, these abstractions allow distributed programs to be designed with properties that can be stated and proved. Impossibility results are associated with these abstractions. Hence, in order to circumvent these impossibilities, the book relies on the failure detector approach, and, consequently, that approach to fault-tolerance is central to the book. Table of Contents: List of Figures / The Atomic Register Abstraction / Implementing an Atomic Register in a Crash-Prone Asynchronous System / The Uniform Reliable Broadcast Abstraction / Uniform Reliable Broadcast Abstraction Despite Unreliable Channels / The Consensus Abstraction / Consensus Algorithms for Asynchronous Systems Enriched with Various Failure Detectors / Constructing Failure Detectors

Autorentext

Michel Raynal is an Emeritus Professor of Informatics, IRISA, University of Rennes, France. He is an established authority in the domain of concurrent and distributed algorithms and systems. Author of numerous papers on this topic,Michel Raynal is a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France, and a member of Academia Europaea. He was the recipient of the 2015 Innovation in Distributed Computing Award (also known as SIROCCO Prize), recipient of the 2018 IEEE Outstanding Technical Achievement in Distributed Computing Award, and recipient of an Outstanding Career Award from the French chapter of ACM Sigops. He is also Distinguished Chair Professor on Distributed Algorithms at the Polytechnic University (PolyU) of Hong Kong. Michel Raynal chaired the program committees of the major conferences on distributed computing. He was the recipient of several "Best Paper" awards of major conferences (including ICDCS 1999, 2000, and 2001, SSS 2009 and 2011, Europar 2010, DISC 2010, PODC 2014). He has also written 13 books on fault-tolerant concurrent and distributed systems, among which the following trilogy published by Springer: Concurrent Programming: Algorithms: Principles and Foundations (515 pages, 2013), Distributed Algorithms for Message-passing Systems (510 pages, 2013), and Fault-Tolerant Message-Passing Distributed Systems: An Algorithmic Approach (Springer, 459 pages, 2018).

Inhalt
List of Figures.- The Atomic Register Abstraction.- Implementing an Atomic Register in a Crash-Prone Asynchronous System.- The Uniform Reliable Broadcast Abstraction.- Uniform Reliable Broadcast Abstraction Despite Unreliable Channels.- The Consensus Abstraction.- Consensus Algorithms for Asynchronous Systems Enriched with Various Failure Detectors.- Constructing Failure Detectors.