Viewstamped replication: A new primary copy method to support highly-available distributed systems

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. Availability 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. Cur method works in a general network with both node crashes and partitions. Replication causes little delay in user computations and tittle information is lost in a reorganization; we use a special kind of timestamp called a viewstamp to detect lost information.