On the Importance of Having an Identity or, is Consensus really Universal?

Buhrman, Harry; Panconesi, Alessandro; Silvestri, Riccardo; Vitanyi, Paul

On the Importance of Having an Identity or, is Consensus really Universal?

Authors

Buhrman, Harry

Panconesi, Alessandro

Silvestri, Riccardo

Vitanyi, Paul

Description

We show that Naming-- the existence of distinct IDs known to all-- is a hidden but necessary assumption of Herlihy's universality result for Consensus. We then show in a very precise sense that Naming is harder than Consensus and bring to the surface some important differences existing between popular shared memory models.
LaTeX, 15 pages, In: Distributed Computing Conference (DISC'00), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1914, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000, 134--148