On the computational power of self-stabilizing systems

AbstractThe computational power of self-stabilizing distributed systems is examined. Assuming availability of any number of processors, each with (small) constant size memory we show that any computable problem can be realized in a self-stabilizing fashion.The result is derived by presenting a distributed system which tolerates transient faults and simulates the execution of a Turing machine. The total amount of memory required by the distributed system is equal to the memory used by the Turing machine (up to a constant factor)