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This page contains supplemental information on my Diploma thesis, which was written between July and December 1997 at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. Feel free to use the information provided here for your own amusement and benefit. All material is copyright 1997 by Felix Gärtner.

Thesis Contents

My thesis is centered around the problem of fault-tolerance in distributed systems. Specifically the two main topics are self-stabilization and replication. Self-stabilization in computer systems was pioneered in 1974 by Edsger W. Dijkstra and is evolving into a universal paradigm for tolerating transient failures. Replication on the other hand is a common method to improve the performance and availability of electronic services, such as distributed databases, bulletin boards or directory services. My thesis tries to bring both fields together, thus creating fault-tolerant distributed replication algorithms. The resulting algorithms have been implemented in an animated simulation environment and are available as a couple of Java applets.

About this Web Site

The main purpose for installing this web page is to make the results of my work available, enabling you to download parts of the thesis and to play around with the applets that implement the algorithms.

Available Information

• Thesis abstract.
• The extended abstract (presented as a FastAbstract at FTCS-28, Munich, June 1998; here's a link to the HTML version)
• Full version of the thesis (current version, in German!). and Errata.
• A bundle containing the discrete event simulations used to measure the performance of the algorithms presented in the thesis.
• A collection of Java applets implementing fault-tolerant replication algorithms.

Other Information Sources on Self-Stabilization and Replication on the Web

• Sandeep Kulkarni's Page on ``Self-Stabilization in spite of Distributed Control''
• Workshop on Self-stabilizing Systems (WSS) 1997 Announcement
• Ted Herman's Comprehensive Bibliography on Self-Stabilization
• Philippas Tsigas' Self-Stabilization Resources
• Stabilization Research at the University of Iowa
• University of California at Santa Cruz, Computer Communication Research Group (with pointers to weak-consistency multicasting research)
• Home Page of Richard Golding (with pointers to his dissertation on weak-consistency group communication)

Acknowledgements

I have to thank my supervisor Dr. Henning Pagnia for his continuous and vital support and his willingness to read all those pages I have written.