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Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems

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Published:01 February 1985Publication History
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Abstract

This paper presents an algorithm by which a process in a distributed system determines a global state of the system during a computation. Many problems in distributed systems can be cast in terms of the problem of detecting global states. For instance, the global state detection algorithm helps to solve an important class of problems: stable property detection. A stable property is one that persists: once a stable property becomes true it remains true thereafter. Examples of stable properties are “computation has terminated,” “ the system is deadlocked” and “all tokens in a token ring have disappeared.” The stable property detection problem is that of devising algorithms to detect a given stable property. Global state detection can also be used for checkpointing.

References

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                cover image ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
                ACM Transactions on Computer Systems  Volume 3, Issue 1
                Feb. 1985
                75 pages
                ISSN:0734-2071
                EISSN:1557-7333
                DOI:10.1145/214451
                Issue’s Table of Contents

                Copyright © 1985 ACM

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                Association for Computing Machinery

                New York, NY, United States

                Publication History

                • Published: 1 February 1985
                Published in tocs Volume 3, Issue 1

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