On the coding of dependencies in distributed computations abstract

The usual way to debug a distributed program is to define a subset of “observable events” among all events produced by the computation. These observable events are sent to an observer process, which uses them to check some given properties. It is well known that the observable events are partially ordered by the “happened before” relation ([3] ). There exist some codings which allow the observer to reconstruct Lamport’s relations. We define three criteria to evaluate these coding and then propose a new coding.