A proposal of a technique for lowering contention for wait-free consensus on asynchronous shared object distributed systems

摘要

Consensus can be viewed as a general form of agreement in the distributed system. The consensus problem is defined over a set of processes. Each process has an initial value and non-failing processes have to decide on a common value that is the initial value of one of the processes. The consensus problem has attracted much attention in the theoretical distributed systems community. On the other hand, it has been largely ignored by real systems implementors. Currently, the consensus problem is to have parctical important applications to many problem in distributed systems, i.e., leader election and atomic broadcast. There is a contention problem in solving a consensus problem on real multiprocessors. Contention influences the performance of protocol greately. In this paper, we propose a new technique in order to reduce the contention cost to O(1), and compare with the conventional technique based en theoretical analysis.