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Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process
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Source Journal of the ACM (JACM) archive
Volume 32 ,  Issue 2  (April 1985) table of contents
Pages: 374 - 382  
Year of Publication: 1985
ISSN:0004-5411
Authors
Michael J. Fischer  Department of Computer Science, Yale University, P.O. Box 2158, Yale Station, New Haven, CT
Nancy A. Lynch  Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA
Michael S. Paterson  Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, England
Publisher
ACM  New York, NY, USA
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ABSTRACT

The consensus problem involves an asynchronous system of processes, some of which may be unreliable. The problem is for the reliable processes to agree on a binary value. In this paper, it is shown that every protocol for this problem has the possibility of nontermination, even with only one faulty process. By way of contrast, solutions are known for the synchronous case, the “Byzantine Generals” problem.


REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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DOLEV, D., AND STRONG, H. R.Distributed commit with bounded waiting. In Proceedings of the 2nd Annual IEEE Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems. IEEE, New York, 1982, pp. 53-60.
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SKEEN, D.A decentralized termination protocol. In Proceedings of the 2nd Annual IEEE Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems. IEEE, New York, 1982, pp. 27-32.
 
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CITED BY  468

Collaborative Colleagues:
Michael J. Fischer: colleagues
Nancy A. Lynch: colleagues
Michael S. Paterson: colleagues