Applications of Consensus Protocols
One important application of consensus protocols is to provide synchronization. Traditional methods of concurrent access to shared data objects implement some form of mutual exclusion through locks. However the drawback is if a process dies while in its critical section, other correct processes may never acquire the lock. Thus mutual exclusion is poorly suited to asynchronous fault tolerant systems. A wait-free implementation of a data object supporting concurrent accesses guarantees that any process can complete its execution within a finite number of steps independent of the behavior of other processes. Atomic objects such as read/write registers have been proposed for the implementation of wait free synchronization. However it has been shown that such objects as well as traditional primitives such as test&set, compare&swap, and fetch&add cannot be used for such an implementation.
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Famous quotes containing the word consensus:
“To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.”
—Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925)