Glossary of terms
This glossary is meant as a service to readers of my papers; it
contains some of the important terms present in my writings. Terms are
linked to the paper that defines them, or the first of my papers that
uses it.
Please contact me if you think that something is missing.
- Byzantine failures
- A process that fails in a Byzantine manner can behave
arbitrarily, for example by deviating from protocol or crashing.
[3]
- confirmable writes
- A write operation is confirmable if the writer can
determine locally when the write has completed (compare:
non-confirmable). [1]
- influence
-
A message m is influenced by a server s iff the sending of m
causally depends on some message sent by s.
In an execution e, server a is influenced by the set of
servers S iff for each s in S there exists a message
m received
by a that was influenced by s.
[2]
- non-confirmable writes
- A write operation is non-confirmable if the writer cannot
determine locally when the write has completed, even though the write
completion is a well-defined event guaranteed to eventually happen.
[1]
- poisonous writes
- A write operation is poisonous if it prevents future
reads from succeeding. In quorum systems, faulty writers can sometims
perform poisonous writes by sending a different value to each server
(instead of the same value, as required by the protocol). [2]
[1] Small
Byzantine Quorum Systems (ps)
[2]
Minimal Byzantine Storage
[3]
The
Byzantine Generals Problem L. Lamport, R. Shostak, and M. Pease
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 4 (3), pp.382-401, July 1982.
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