Fault-Tolerant Message-Passing Distributed Systems: An Algorithmic Approach

This book presents the most important fault-tolerant distributed programming abstractions and their associated distributed algorithms, in particular in terms of reliable communication and agreement, which lie at the heart of nearly all distributed applications. These programming abstractions, distributed objects or services, allow software designers and programmers to cope with asynchrony and the most important types of failures such as process crashes, message losses, and malicious behaviors of computing entities, widely known under the term "Byzantine fault-tolerance". The author introduces these notions in an incremental manner, starting from a clear specification, followed by algorithms which are first described intuitively and then proved correct. 

The book also presents impossibility results in classic distributed computing models, along with strategies, mainly failure detectors and randomization, that allow us to enrich these models. In this sense, the book constitutes an introduction to the science of distributed computing, with applications in all domains of distributed systems, such as cloud computing and blockchains. Each chapter comes with exercises and bibliographic notes to help the reader approach, understand, and master the fascinating field of fault-tolerant distributed computing.

Prof. Michel Raynal is among the top researchers in the world on the topic of distributed algorithms. He is a full professor at IRISA (Université de Rennes, France), where he founded in 1984 one of the very first research groups on Distributed Algorithms. He has been the principal investigator in numerous related research national and international projects, and he has been invited by many universities around the world to give lectures on distributed algorithms and distributed computing. He has over 400 academic publications on this topic, he has authored twelve books on related topics, and he was involved in all the key conferences in distributed computing. His current research interests include distributed algorithms, distributed computing systems, distributed computability and dependability, and the fundamental principles that underlie the design and construction of distributed computing systems. Michel Raynal is also Distinguished Chair Professor at the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong.