CS 134 Lecture 3 4-6-20 Notes

Replicated State Machine - abstraction to ensure consistency and give user

abstraction of single machine despite distributed back-end

Logical timestamps - establish relative event ordering without absolute timestamps

and clock synchronization

Only have to ensure ordering between causal events

Can use vector clocks to identify causality

Questions:

1) So even with logical timestamps, an absolute total ordering is impossible? Is

there any known way to ensure absolute total ordering without absolute timestamps
and perfect clock synchronization?

Yes this is correct. There's no way to have total global ordering based on wall-
clock time, but lamport timestamps do allow for a total ordering shared across
nodes.

2) The FIFO network assumption (from slide 26) is to ensure that we receive
monotonically increasing timestamps from other nodes?

Yes

3) To make sure I understand the example in Slide 27, basically until a node gets
an update from every other node with a logical timestamp higher than event e, it
can't execute event e right?

Yes that is correct.