Localizing Failures in Distributed Synchronization

We investigate the fault-tolerance of distributed algorithms in asynchronous message passing systems with undetectable process failures. We introduce failure locality as a measure of the fault-tolerance of distributed algorithms. This measure captures the general idea of allowing part of a system to continue to function despite the failure of other parts of the system. We concentrate on two problems, the dining philosophers problem and the committee coordination problem, and present algorithms with an optimal failure locality.