CONSISTENT RECORDS IN ASYNCHRONOUS COMPUTATIONS

A global record (i.e. a set of local records, one for each process of an asynchronous computation) abstracts what is usually called global s tate, global checkpoint or global snapshot in particular problems. Con sistent global records are important in many applications. This paper addresses the following question: ''Given a set of local records, is i t possible that these records belong to the same consistent global rec ord?''. This question has been answered by Netter and Xu in the partic ular context of message passing systems. This paper extends their resu lt to a very general asynchronous computational model that encompasses shared memory systems and various message passing systems (with relia ble or unreliable and point-to-point or multicast or broadcast communi cations).