Communication-efficient and crash-quiescent Omega with unknown membership

The failure detector class Omega (Ω) provides an eventual leader election functionality, i.e., eventually all correct processes permanently trust the same correct process. An algorithm is communication-efficient if the number of links that carry messages forever is bounded by n, being n the number of processes in the system. It has been defined that an algorithm is crash-quiescent if it eventually stops sending messages to crashed processes. In this regard, it has been recently shown the impossibility of implementing Ω crash quiescently without a majority of correct processes. We say that the membership is unknown if each process pi only knows its own identity and the number of processes in the system (that is, i and n), but pi does not know the identity of the rest of processes of the system. There is a type of link (denoted by ADD link) in which a bounded (but unknown) number of consecutive messages can be delayed or lost. In this work we present the first implementation (to our knowledge) of Ω in partially synchronous systems with ADD links and with unknown membership. Furthermore, it is the first implementation of Ω that combines two very interesting properties: communication-efficiency and crash-quiescence when the majority of processes are correct. Finally, we also obtain with the same algorithm a failure detector () such that every correct process eventually and permanently outputs the set of all correct processes.

Seismic hazards of the Iberian Peninsula - evaluation with Kernel functions

The seismic hazard of the Iberian Peninsula is analysed using a nonparametric methodology based on statistical kernel functions; the activity rate is derived from the catalogue data, both its spatial dependence (without a seismogenetic zonation) and its magnitude dependence (without using Gutenberg–Richter's law). The catalogue is that of the Instituto Geográfico Nacional, supplemented with other catalogues around the periphery; the quantification of events has been homogenised and spatially or temporally interrelated events have been suppressed to assume a Poisson process. The activity rate is determined by the kernel function, the bandwidth and the effective periods. The resulting rate is compared with that produced using Gutenberg–Richter statistics and a zoned approach. Three attenuation laws have been employed, one for deep sources and two for shallower events, depending on whether their magnitude was above or below 5. The results are presented as seismic hazard maps for different spectral frequencies and for return periods of 475 and 2475 yr, which allows constructing uniform hazard spectra.

Set agreement and the loneliness failure detector in crash-recovery systems

The set agreement problem states that from n proposed values at most n-1 can be decided. Traditionally, this problem is solved using a failure detector in asynchronous systems where processes may crash but not recover, where processes have different identities, and where all processes initially know the membership. In this paper we study the set agreement problem and the weakest failure detector L used to solve it in asynchronous message passing systems where processes may crash and recover, with homonyms (i.e., processes may have equal identities) and without a complete initial knowledge of the membership.