July 2014
Intermediate to advanced
554 pages
17h 49m
English
Chapter 8
A computation is a sequence of atomic actions that transform a given initial state to the final state. While such actions are totally ordered in a sequential process, they are only partially ordered in a distributed system. It is customary to reason about the properties of a program in terms of states and state transitions.
In this context, the state (also known as global state or configuration) of a distributed system is the set of local states of all the component processes as well as the states of every channel through which messages flow. Since the local physical clocks are never perfectly synchronized, the components of a global state can never be recorded at the same time. In asynchronous ...