Using Failure Detectors to Solve Consensus in Asynchronous Shared-Memory Systems (Extended Abstract)

Chandra and Toueg proposed a new approach to overcome the impossibility of reaching consensus in asynchronous message-passing systems subject to crash failures [6]. They augment the asynchronous message-passing system with a (possibly unreliable) failure detector. Informally, a failure detector provides some information about the processes that have crashed during an execution of the system. In this paper, we present several Consensus algorithms using different types failure detectors in asynchronous shared-memory systems. We also prove several lower bounds and impossibility results regarding solving Consensus using failure detectors in asynchronous shared-memory systems