Assignment handed out on Tuesday, March 13, 2001

Due in Recitation on 3/14/2001:

Read Chapters 10 and 11 from the text. There are many proofs. You don't have to spend the time to understand them inside and out. Instead, understand the implication of the proofs (e.g., under which circumstances you can solve the byzantine generals problem). Your writing/discussion assignment:
Distributed mutual exclusion can be accomplished using a variety of algorithms. Several are described in the text. Those algorithms, however, react differently to process failures.

Suppose that at most 1 process can fail. If you were able to reliably detect the failure, which algorithm would you choose for distributed mutual exclusion? Explain why. How does your algorithm react if you cannot reliably detect the failure? What kind of approach would you then use to achieve distributed mutual exclusion?

Hint 1: Use a case-based analysis. Consider the following cases: Hint 2: Think about the consensus problem