Keywords and Synonyms
Atomic scan
Problem Definition
Implementing a snapshot object is an abstraction of the problem of obtaining a consistent view of several shared variables while other processes are concurrently updating those variables.
In an asynchronous shared-memory distributed system, a collection of n processes communicate by accessing shared data structures, called objects. The system provides basic types of shared objects; other needed types must be built from them. One approach uses locks to guarantee exclusive access to the basic objects, but this approach is not fault-tolerant, risks deadlock or livelock, and causes delays when a process holding a lock runs slowly. Lock-free algorithms avoid these problems but introduce new challenges. For example, if a process reads two shared objects, the values it reads may not be consistent if the objects were updated between the two reads.
A snapshot object stores a vector of m values, each from some domain D. It provides two...
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Ruppert, E. (2008). Snapshots in Shared Memory. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30162-4_380
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