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Synchronous, asynchronous, and causally ordered communication

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Summary

This article studies characteristic properties of synchronous and asynchronous message communications in distributed systems. Based on the causality relation between events in computations with asynchronous communications, we characterize computations which are realizable with synchronous communications, which respect causal order, or where messages between two processes are always received in the order sent. It is shown that the corresponding computation classes form a strict hierarchy. Furthermore, an axiomatic definition of distributed computations with synchronous communications is given, and it is shown that several informal characterizations of such computations are equivalent when they are formalized appropriately. As an application, we use our results to show that the distributed termination detection algorithm by Dijkstra et al. is correct under a weaker synchrony assumption than originally stated.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire d’Informatique, Ecole Polytechnique, F-91128, Palaiseau Cedex, France

    Bernadette Charron-Bost

  2. Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Darmstadt, Alexanderstrasse 10, D-64283, Darmstadt, Germany

    Friedemann Mattern

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Utrecht, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508, TB Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Gerard Tel

Authors
  1. Bernadette Charron-Bost
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  2. Friedemann Mattern
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  3. Gerard Tel
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Additional information

The work of Gerard Tel was supported by the ESPRIT II Basic Research Actions Program of the EC under contract no. 3075 (project ALCOM)

Sometimes, however, a difference between the two notions “blocking” and “synchronous” (or “non-blocking” and “asynchronous”, resp.) is made in the literature. This is the case, for example, for the MPI message passing interface which is becoming a de facto standard for message-based communication [24]. Here, a blocking send primitive does not return until the message has been copied out of the sender’s buffer, whereas a non-blocking send can return immediately [16]. Since we abstract from implementation aspects such as message buffering, we are not concerned with this issue here.

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Charron-Bost, B., Mattern, F. & Tel, G. Synchronous, asynchronous, and causally ordered communication. Distrib Comput 9, 173–191 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/s004460050018

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s004460050018

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