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Dining philosophers with masking tolerance to crash faults

We examine the tolerance of dining philosopher algorithms subject to process
crash faults in arbitrary conflict graphs. This classic problem is unsolvable in asynchronous
message-passing systems subject to even a single crash fault. By contrast,
dining can be solved in synchronous systems capable of implementing the perfect
failure detector P (from the Chandra-Toueg hierarchy). We show that dining is also
solvable in weaker timing models using a combination of the trusting detector T and
the strong detector S; Our approach extends and composes two currents of previous
research. First, we define a parametric generalization of Lynch’s classic algorithm
for hierarchical resource allocation. Our construction converts any mutual exclusion
algorithm into a valid dining algorithm. Second, we consider the fault-tolerant mutual
exclusion algorithm (FTME) of Delporte-Gallet, et al., which uses T and the
strong detector S to mask crash faults in any environment. We instantiate our dining
construction with FTME, and prove that the resulting dining algorithm guarantees
masking tolerance to crash faults. Our contribution (1) defines a new construction
for transforming mutual exclusion algorithms into dining algorithms, and (2) demonstrates
a better upper-bound on the fault-detection capabilities necessary to mask
crash faults in dining philosophers.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1072
Date15 May 2009
CreatorsIdimadakala, Vijaya K.
ContributorsPike, Scott M.
Source SetsTexas A and M University
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeBook, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text
Formatelectronic, application/pdf, born digital

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