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Mellor-Crummey and Scott Mutual Exclusion Algorithm

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Algorithms

  • 72 Accesses

Years and Authors of Summarized Original Work

  • 1991; Mellor-Crummey, Scott

Problem Definition

Mutual exclusion is a fundamental concurrent programming problem (see Concurrent Programming, Mutual Exclusion entry), in which a set of processes must coordinate their access to a critical section so that, at any point in time, at most a single process is in the critical section.

To a large extent, shared-memory mutual exclusion research focused on busy-waiting mutual exclusion, in which, while waiting for the critical section to be freed, processes repeatedly test the values of shared-memory variables. A significant portion of this research over the last two decades was devoted to local-spin algorithms [2], in which all busy-waiting is done by means of read-only loops that repeatedly test locally accessible variables.

Local-Spin Algorithms and the RMRs Metric

A natural way to measure the time complexity of algorithms in shared-memory multiprocessors is to count the number of memory accesses...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O. Box 653, Alon Building, 218, 84105, Beer-Sheva, Israel

    Danny Hendler

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  1. Danny Hendler
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Correspondence to Danny Hendler .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Ming-Yang Kao

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Hendler, D. (2016). Mellor-Crummey and Scott Mutual Exclusion Algorithm. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2864-4_605

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