Viewstamped Replication: A New Primary Copy Method to Support Highly-Available Distributed Systems

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“Viewstamped Replication: A New Primary Copy Method to Support Highly-Available Distributed Systems” by Brian Oki and Barbara Liskov. In Proceedings of the Seventh Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), Aug. 1988.

Abstract

One of the potential benefits of distributed systems is their use in providing highly-available services that are likely to be usable when needed. Availabilay is achieved through replication. By having more than one copy of information, a service continues to be usable even when some copies are inaccessible, for example, because of a crash of the computer where a copy was stored. This paper presents a new replication algorithm that has desirable performance properties. Our approach is based on the primary copy technique. Computations run at a primary. which notifies its backups of what it has done. If the primary crashes, the backups are reorganized, and one of the backups becomes the new primary. Our method works in a general network with both node crashes and partitions. Replication causes little delay in user computations and little information is lost in a reorganization; we use a special kind of timestamp called a viewstamp to detect lost information.

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BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{oki88vr,
   author = {Brian Oki and Barbara Liskov},
   title = {Viewstamped Replication: A New Primary Copy Method to Support
	Highly-Available Distributed Systems},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh Annual ACM Symposium on
	Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC)},
   publisher = {ACM},
   month = aug,
   year = {1988}
}