Brief Announcement: Collect in the Presence of Continuous Churn with Application to Snapshots and Lattice Agreement

Abstract

A popular programming technique that contributes to designing provably-correct distributed applications is to use shared objects for interprocess communication, instead of more low-level techniques. Although shared objects are a convenient abstraction, they are not generally provided in large-scale distributed systems; instead, the processes keep individual copies of the data and communicate by sending messages to keep the copies consistent. Traditional distributed computing considers a static system, with known bounds on the number of fixed computing nodes and the number of possible failures. Dynamic distributed systems allow nodes to enter and leave the system at will, either due to failures and recoveries, moving in the real world, or changes to the systems' composition. Motivating applications include those in peer-to-peer, sensor, mobile, and social networks, as well as server farms.