Knowledge in a distributed environment

Thesis/Dissertation · Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 1986

OSTI ID:6829929

Moses, Y O

The distributed nature of information in a distributed system is one of the major issues that protocols for cooperation and coordination between individual components in such a system must handle. Individual sites customarily have only partial knowledge about the general state of the system. Moreover, different information is available at the different sites of the system. Consequently, a central role of communication in such protocols is to inform particular sites about events that take place at other sites, and to transform the system's state of knowledge in a way that will guarantee the successful achievement of the goals of the protocol. This thesis is an initial attempt to study the role of knowledge in distributed system. A general framework is presented for defining knowledge in a distributed system, and a variety of states of knowledge are identified that groups of processors may have. These states of knowledge seem to capture basic aspects of coordinated actions in a distributed environment. This machinery is applied to the analysis of a number of problems. Finally, this machinery is applied to the study of fault tolerance in systems of unreliable processors, providing considerable insight into the Byzantine agreement problem, and obtaining improved protocols for Byzantine agreement and many related problems.

• Research Organization: Stanford Univ., CA (USA)
• OSTI ID: 6829929
• Resource Relation: Other Information: Thesis (Ph. D.)
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING
KNOWLEDGE BASE
FAULT TOLERANT COMPUTERS
ARRAY PROCESSORS
COMMUNICATIONS
COMPUTERS
DATA PROCESSING
DIGITAL COMPUTERS
PROCESSING
990300* - Information Handling
990210 - Supercomputers- (1987-1989)