wlrush@water.waterloo.edu (Wenchantress Wench Wendall) (02/01/90)
University of Massachusetts, will speak on
`` Preference-Based Leader Election in Distributed Systems.''
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES
DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS SEMINAR
-Thursday, February 8, 1990
Professor Suresh Singh, Dept. of Computer and
Information Science, University of Massachusetts, will
speak on ``Preference-Based Leader Election in
Distributed Systems.''
TIME: 3:30 p.m.
ROOM: DC 1304
ABSTRACT
In a distributed system, an algorithm used to select a
distinguished node or leader to coordinate some
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activity in the system is known as a leader election
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algorithm. Existing leader election algorithms may be
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characterized as extrema-finding algorithms in which
all nodes are assumed to have a unique ID number, and
the leader which is elected is simply that node which
has the largest ID number. In this paper, we examine
socially-inspired leader election algorithms that
attempt to locate the centralized controller at a
``good'' node (from a performance standpoint) in the
system. In the ``preference-based'' approaches
examined here, each node in the system uses locally
available information to ``vote'' for the various
candidates (potential leaders) on the basis of the
performance level it would realize under each of them.
The preference-based leader election algorithms we
propose and examine are simple, are shown (via both
simulation and analysis) to perform almost as well as
traditional optimization-based approach towards leader
election, and have important advantages over both
current leader election algorithms and an
optimization-based approach towards leader election.