fast allocation of nearby resources in a distributed system
Dijkstra's informally-stated Dining Philosophers problem [D] involves a number n of philosophers sitting in a circle, a single fork between each pair of adjacent philosophers. The problem is to program the philosophers in ways which guarantee certain conditions of fairness and absence of deadlock. In this paper, the problem is generalized to a distributed system resource allocation problem which is local in two senses. First, although the system and number of users can be very large, there is a limit to the overlap in resource demands of different users. The second condition can be thought of as a property of the geography of the network - the resources are (or can be) located in the network in such a way that communication between a user and any of its required resources is fast.
allocation resource distributed systems systems fairness deadlock paper general resource allocation locality senses users users network locatability communication user