Distributed Computing Through Combinatorial Topology describes techniques for analyzing distributed algorithms based on award winning combinatorial topology research. The authors present a solid theoretical foundation relevant to many real systems reliant on parallelism with unpredictable delays, such as multicore microprocessors, wireless networks, distributed systems, and Internet protocols. Today, a new student or researcher must assemble a collection of scattered conference publications, which are typically terse and commonly use different notations and terminologies. This book provides a self-contained explanation of the mathematics to readers with computer science backgrounds, as well as explaining computer science concepts to readers with backgrounds in applied mathematics. The first section presents mathematical notions and models, including message passing and shared-memory systems, failures, and timing models. The next section presents core concepts in two chapters each: first, proving a simple result that lends itself to examples and pictures that will build up readers' intuition; then generalizing the concept to prove a more sophisticated result. The overall result weaves together and develops the basic concepts of the field, presenting them in a gradual and intuitively appealing way. The book's final section discusses advanced topics typically found in a graduate-level course for those who wish to explore further. - Named a 2013 Notable Computer Book for Computing Methodologies by Computing Reviews - Gathers knowledge otherwise spread across research and conference papers using consistent notations and a standard approach to facilitate understanding - Presents unique insights applicable to multiple computing fields, including multicore microprocessors, wireless networks, distributed systems, and Internet protocols - Synthesizes and distills material into a simple, unified presentation with examples, illustrations, and exercises

Gives a thorough exposition of network spanners and other locality-preserving network representations such as sparse covers and partitions.

To understand the power of distributed systems, it is necessary to understand their inherent limitations: what problems cannot be solved in particular systems, or without sufficient resources (such as time or space). This book presents key techniques for proving such impossibility results and applies them to a variety of different problems in a variety of different system models. Insights gained from these results are highlighted, aspects of a problem that make it difficult are isolated, features of an architecture that make it inadequate for solving certain problems efficiently are identified, and different system models are compared.

This monograph presents an application of concepts and methods from algebraic topology to models of concurrent processes in computer science and their analysis. Taking well-known discrete models for concurrent processes in resource management as a point of departure, the book goes on to refine combinatorial and topological models. In the process, it develops tools and invariants for the new discipline directed algebraic topology, which is driven by fundamental research interests as well as by applications, primarily in the static analysis of concurrent programs. The state space of a concurrent program is described as a higher-dimensional space, the topology of which encodes the essential properties of the system. In order to analyse all possible executions in the state space, more than “just” the topological properties have to be considered: Execution paths need to respect a partial order given by the time flow. As a result, tools and concepts from topology have to be extended to take privileged directions into account. The target audience for this book consists of graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the field, mathematicians and computer scientists alike.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems, SSS 2019, held in Pisa, Italy, in October 2019. The 21 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers deal with the design and development of distributed systems with a focus on systems that are able to provide guarantees on their structure, performance, and/or security in the face of an adverse operational environment.

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.

This book features a unique selection of works presented at the 2019 annual international conference of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP). Every contribution has been peer-reviewed, revised, and extended. The included chapters are thematically diverse; topics include epistemology, dynamic epistemic logic, topology, philosophy of science and computation, game theory and abductive inferences, automated reasoning and mathematical proofs, computer simulations, scientific modelling, applied ethics, pedagogy, human-robot interactions, and big data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. The volume is a testament to the value of interdisciplinary approaches to the computational and informational turn. We live in a time of tremendous development, which requires rigorous reflection on the philosophical nature of these technologies and how they are changing the world. How can we understand these technologies? How do these technologies change our understanding of the world? And how do these technologies affect our place as humans in the world? These questions, and more, are addressed in this volume which is of interest to philosophers, engineers, and computer scientists alike.