The Failure Detector Abstraction Felix C. Freiling, University of Mannheim and Rachid Guerraoui, EPFL and MIT CSAIL and Petr Kuznetsov, TU Berlin/Deutsche Telekom Laboratories A failure detector is a fundamental abstraction in distributed computing. This paper surveys this abstraction through two dimensions. First we study failure detectors as building blocks to simplify the design of reliable distributed algorithms. In particular, we illustrate how failure detectors can factor out timing assumptions to detect failures in distributed agreement algorithms. Second, we study failure detectors as computability benchmarks. That is, we survey the weakest failure detector question and illustrate how failure detectors can be used to classify problems. We also highlight some limitations of the failure detector abstraction along each of the dimensions. Categories and Subject Descriptors: A.1 [General Literature]: Introductory and Survey; C.4 [Computer Systems Organization]: Performance of Systems|fault tolerance; modeling tech- niques; reliability, availability, and serviceability General Terms: Algorithms, Design, Reliability, Theory Additional Key Words and Phrases: distributed system, agreement problem, consensus, atomic commit, fault tolerance, liveness, message passing, safety, synchrony The first author's work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the Emmy Noether programme. Contact author's address: University of Mannheim, Department of Computer Science, D-68131 Mannheim, Germany, contact author email:
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