Elsevier

Journal of Algorithms

Volume 30, Issue 1, January 1999, Pages 68-105
Journal of Algorithms

Regular Article
The Instancy of Snapshots and Commuting Objects

https://doi.org/10.1006/jagm.1998.0969Get rights and content

Abstract

We present a sequence of constructions of commuting synchronization objects (e.g.,fetch-and-incrementandfetch-and-add) in a system ofnprocessors from any two processor synchronization objects whose consensus number is two or more (Herlihy, “Proceedings of the Tenth ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 1991,” pp. 11–22). Each implementation in the sequence uses a particular type of shared memory snapshot as a building block. Later implementations in the sequence are based on higher quality snapshots. The first implementation of afetch-and-incrementuses the standard atomic snapshot concept, introduced by Afek et al. and Anderson (Afek et al.,J. Assoc. Comput. Mach.40(4) (1993), 873–890; Anderson, “Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Assoc. Comput. Mach. Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, August 1990,” pp. 15–29) while the last construction in the sequence, offetch-and-add, is based on the immediate snapshot concept introduced in (Borowsky and Gafni, “Proceedings of the 12th Assoc. Comput. Mach. Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, August 1993,” pp. 41–51). This last construction also yields an implementation of a stronger snapshot, which we callWrite-and-snapshot. In addition, this work solves an open question of Borowsky and Gafni by presenting an implementation of a multishot immediate snapshot object. Additional implications of our constructions are (1) the existence of fault-tolerant self implementations of commuting objects, (2) improvements in the efficiency of randomized constructions of commuting objects from read/write registers, and (3) low contention constructions of commuting objects.

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  • Cited by (0)

    A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 12th Assoc. Comput. Mach. Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 1993.

    Motorola Semi-Conductors Israel.

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