Distributed Termination Detection with Roughly Synchronized Clocks

Abstract A distributed and fully symmetric solution to the distributed termination problem is presented. The solution developed applies to systems in which each processor has a physical clock which is roughly synchronized with all other processors' physical clocks. Termination detection is achieved by circulating a timestamped token message around a logical ring of all the processors. The protocol does not require that the underlying application freeze in order to detect termination.