Distributed Systems, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11

Coordination Algorithms

11.1 Introduction

Distributed applications rely on specific forms of coordination among processes to accomplish their goals. Some tasks of coordination can be viewed as a form of preprocessing. Examples include clock synchronization, spanning tree construction, and leader election. In this section, we single out a couple of specific coordination algorithms and explain their construction. Our first example addresses leader election, where one among a designated set of processes is chosen as leader and assigned special responsibilities. The second example addresses a problem of model transformation: Recall that asynchrony is hard to deal with in real-life applications due to the lack of temporal guarantees—it ...