Years and Authors of Summarized Original Work
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1993; Afek, Attiya, Dolev, Gafni, Merritt, Shavit
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 objectstores...
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Recommended Reading
Afek Y, Attiya H, Dolev D, Gafni E, Merritt M, Shavit N (1993) Atomic snapshots of shared memory. J Assoc Comput Mach 40:873–890
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Ruppert, E. (2016). Snapshots in Shared Memory. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2864-4_380
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