Chapter 12. Consensus
Introduction
One of the primary motivations for building distributed systems is to improve reliability by replicating a computation in several independent processors. There are two properties that we can hope to achieve in a reliable system: a system is fail-safe if one or more failures do not cause damage to the system or to its users; a system is fault-tolerant if it continues to fulfil its requirements even if there are one or more failures. A distributed system is not automatically fail-safe or fault-tolerant. The RA algorithm for distributed mutual exclusion requires the cooperation of all the processes and will deadlock if one of them fails. The following diagram shows the general architecture of a reliable system:
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