Distributed Algorithms

In Distributed Algorithms, Nancy Lynch provides a blueprint for designing, implementing, and analyzing distributed algorithms. She directs her book at a wide audience, including students, programmers, system designers, and researchers.

Distributed Algorithms contains the most significant algorithms and impossibility results in the area, all in a simple automata-theoretic setting. The algorithms are proved correct, and their complexity is analyzed according to precisely defined complexity measures. The problems covered include resource allocation, communication, consensus among distributed processes, data consistency, deadlock detection, leader election, global snapshots, and many others.

The material is organized according to the system model—first by the timing model and then by the interprocess communication mechanism. The material on system models is isolated in separate chapters for easy reference.

The presentation is completely rigorous, yet is intuitive enough for immediate comprehension. This book familiarizes readers with important problems, algorithms, and impossibility results in the area: readers can then recognize the problems when they arise in practice, apply the algorithms to solve them, and use the impossibility results to determine whether problems are unsolvable. The book also provides readers with the basic mathematical tools for designing new algorithms and proving new impossibility results. In addition, it teaches readers how to reason carefully about distributed algorithms—to model them formally, devise precise specifications for their required behavior, prove their correctness, and evaluate their performance with realistic measures.

Distributed algorithms provide an essential framework for understanding computing systems in a range of areas, including telecommunications, distributed information processing, scientific computing, and real-time process control. This comprehensive introduction shows programmers, system designers, and researchers how to recognize the problems surrounding distributed systems in practical settings.

About the author: Nancy A. Lynch is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and heads MIT's Theory of Distributed Systems research group. She is the author of numerous research articles about distributed algorithms and impossibility results, and about formal modeling and verification of distributed systems.