The Bancomat problem: An example of resource allocation in a partitionable asynchronous system

A partition-aware application is an application that can make progress in multiple connected components. In this paper, we examine a particular partition-aware application to evaluate the properties provided by different partitionable group membership protocols. The application we examine is a simple resource allocation problem that we call the Bancomat problem. We define a metric specific to this application, which we call the cushion, that captures the effects of the uncertainty of the global state caused from partitioning. We solve the Bancomat problem using four different approaches for building partition-aware applications. We compare the approaches in terms of their cushions and discuss how well different group membership protocols support the different approaches. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.