Project SherlockEst. Knowledge

Paper

1985

Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process

Michael J. Fischer, Nancy A. Lynch & Michael S. Paterson

Shows no deterministic protocol can guarantee consensus in an asynchronous system if even one process may fail.

Before you start

FreeAdvancedlink checked 17 Sept 2026

If this is the wrong level

Too hard? Start hereMIT 6.824 Distributed SystemsRobert Morris (MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems), 2020Teaches distributed systems through the papers that defined them — GFS, Raft, Spanner — arguing that fault tolerance and consistency are the same problem approached from two directions.

Groundwork for

Works in the library that name this one as a prerequisite.

Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed SystemsTushar Deepak Chandra & Sam Toueg, 1996Shows consensus is solvable in an asynchronous system augmented with a failure detector satisfying precisely specified, and surprisingly weak, completeness and accuracy properties, pinning down exactly how much synchrony consensus needs.

Filed under Distributed Systems in Computer Science.