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Matrix Clock
A matrix clock is a mechanism for capturing chronological and causal relationships in a distributed system. Matrix clocks are a generalization of the notion of vector clocks. A matrix clock maintains a vector of the vector clocks for each communicating host. Every time a message is exchanged, the sending host sends not only what it knows about the global state of time, but also the state of time that it received from other hosts. This allows establishing a lower bound on what other hosts know, and is useful in applications such as checkpointing and garbage collection. References See also * Lamport timestamps * Vector clock * Version vector A version vector is a mechanism for tracking changes to data in a distributed system, where multiple agents might update the data at different times. The version vector allows the participants to determine if one update preceded another (happened-b ... {{comp-sci-stub Logical clock algorithms ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Distributed System
A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. The components of a distributed system interact with one another in order to achieve a common goal. Three significant challenges of distributed systems are: maintaining concurrency of components, overcoming the lack of a global clock, and managing the independent failure of components. When a component of one system fails, the entire system does not fail. Examples of distributed systems vary from SOA-based systems to massively multiplayer online games to peer-to-peer applications. A computer program that runs within a distributed system is called a distributed program, and ''distributed programming'' is the process of writing such programs. There are many different types of implementations for t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vector Clock
A vector clock is a data structure used for determining the partial ordering of events in a distributed system and detecting causality violations. Just as in Lamport timestamps, inter-process messages contain the state of the sending process's logical clock. A vector clock of a system of ''N'' processes is an array/vector of ''N'' logical clocks, one clock per process; a local "largest possible values" copy of the global clock-array is kept in each process. Denote VC_i as the vector clock maintained by process i, the clock updates proceed as follows: * Initially all clocks are zero. * Each time a process experiences an internal event, it increments its own logical clock in the vector by one. For instance, upon an event at process i, it updates VC_ \leftarrow VC_ + 1. * Each time a process sends a message, it increments its own logical clock in the vector by one (as in the bullet above, but not twice for the same event) and then the message piggybacks a copy of its own vector. * E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vector (data Structure)
In computer science, an array is a data structure consisting of a collection of ''elements'' (values or variables), each identified by at least one ''array index'' or ''key''. An array is stored such that the position of each element can be computed from its index tuple by a mathematical formula. The simplest type of data structure is a linear array, also called one-dimensional array. For example, an array of ten 32-bit (4-byte) integer variables, with indices 0 through 9, may be stored as ten words at memory addresses 2000, 2004, 2008, ..., 2036, (in hexadecimal: 0x7D0, 0x7D4, 0x7D8, ..., 0x7F4) so that the element with index ''i'' has the address 2000 + (''i'' × 4). The memory address of the first element of an array is called first address, foundation address, or base address. Because the mathematical concept of a matrix can be represented as a two-dimensional grid, two-dimensional arrays are also sometimes called "matrices". In some cases the term "vector" is used in c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience. Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions. Time has long been an important subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars. Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems. 108 pages. Time in physics is operationally defined as "what a clock reads". The physical nature of time is addre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Checkpointing
Checkpointing is a technique that provides fault tolerance for computing systems. It basically consists of saving a snapshot of the application's state, so that applications can restart from that point in case of failure. This is particularly important for long running applications that are executed in failure-prone computing systems. Checkpointing in distributed systems In the distributed computing environment, checkpointing is a technique that helps tolerate failures that otherwise would force long-running application to restart from the beginning. The most basic way to implement checkpointing, is to stop the application, copy all the required data from the memory to reliable storage (e.g., parallel file system) and then continue with the execution. In case of failure, when the application restarts, it does not need to start from scratch. Rather, it will read the latest state ("the checkpoint") from the stable storage and execute from that. While there is ongoing debate on wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Garbage Collection (computer Science)
In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The ''garbage collector'' attempts to reclaim memory which was allocated by the program, but is no longer referenced; such memory is called '' garbage''. Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp. Garbage collection relieves the programmer from doing manual memory management, where the programmer specifies what objects to de-allocate and return to the memory system and when to do so. Other, similar techniques include stack allocation, region inference, and memory ownership, and combinations thereof. Garbage collection may take a significant proportion of a program's total processing time, and affect performance as a result. Resources other than memory, such as network sockets, database handles, windows, file descriptors, and device descriptors, are not typically handled by garbage collection, but ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lamport Timestamps
The Lamport timestamp algorithm is a simple logical clock algorithm used to determine the order of events in a distributed computer system. As different nodes or processes will typically not be perfectly synchronized, this algorithm is used to provide a partial ordering of events with minimal overhead, and conceptually provide a starting point for the more advanced vector clock method. The algorithm is named after its creator, Leslie Lamport. Distributed algorithms such as resource synchronization often depend on some method of ordering events to function. For example, consider a system with two processes and a disk. The processes send messages to each other, and also send messages to the disk requesting access. The disk grants access in the order the messages were ''received''. For example process A sends a message to the disk requesting write access, and then sends a read instruction message to process B. Process B receives the message, and as a result sends its own read request m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vector Clock
A vector clock is a data structure used for determining the partial ordering of events in a distributed system and detecting causality violations. Just as in Lamport timestamps, inter-process messages contain the state of the sending process's logical clock. A vector clock of a system of ''N'' processes is an array/vector of ''N'' logical clocks, one clock per process; a local "largest possible values" copy of the global clock-array is kept in each process. Denote VC_i as the vector clock maintained by process i, the clock updates proceed as follows: * Initially all clocks are zero. * Each time a process experiences an internal event, it increments its own logical clock in the vector by one. For instance, upon an event at process i, it updates VC_ \leftarrow VC_ + 1. * Each time a process sends a message, it increments its own logical clock in the vector by one (as in the bullet above, but not twice for the same event) and then the message piggybacks a copy of its own vector. * E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Version Vector
A version vector is a mechanism for tracking changes to data in a distributed system, where multiple agents might update the data at different times. The version vector allows the participants to determine if one update preceded another (happened-before), followed it, or if the two updates happened concurrently (and therefore might conflict with each other). In this way, version vectors enable causality tracking among data replicas and are a basic mechanism for optimistic replication. In mathematical terms, the version vector generates a preorder that tracks the events that precede, and may therefore influence, later updates. Version vectors maintain state identical to that in a vector clock, but the update rules differ slightly; in this example, replicas can either experience local updates (e.g., the user editing a file on the local node), or can synchronize with another replica: * Initially all vector counters are zero. * Each time a replica experiences a local update event, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
