Tobias Landes.
Preserving Logical Time while Abstracting from Distributed Computations
In Hamid R. Arabnia, editor, Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications, PDPTA '07, Volume II, pages 543-549, Las Vegas, Nevada, CSREA Press, June 2007.
Abstract
A large number of tasks in distributed systems are based on the fundamental problem of getting a consistent view on a distributed computation's causality, which is commonly solved by appliance of logical clocks as a means of capturing the flow of information within and among distributed processes. In the paper at hand it is discussed in detail how such a view, once properly constructed, might be in parts abstracted from without compromising logical time consistency. The goal is, ideally, to be able to zoom in and out of parts of the view, dependent on the details needed, with maximum consistency and transparency. This paper shows how this may be achieved by applying a tailor-made set of methods for selecting, merging and timestamping both events and shared memory objects, making these methods applicable to a wide range of distributed systems. It is also shown how to maximize transparency by making use of certain beneficial characteristics of tree clocks.
