Abstract
While there have been many register construction algorithms in the recent years, results establishing the intrinsic complexity of such constructions are scarce. In this paper, we establish the minimum shared memory necessary to construct an atomic single-writer, single-reader, N-bit register A from single-writer, single-reader, single bit safe registers. The write operation on A is wait-free, but the read operation is not. We also provide constructions that match our lower bounds.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bard Bloom. Constructing two writer atomic registers. In The 6th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 249–259, 1987.
J. Burns and G. Peterson. Constructing multi-reader atomic values from nonatomic values. In The 6th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 222–231, 1987.
P.J. Courtois, F. Heymans, and D.L. Parnas. Concurrent control with readers and writers. Communications of the ACM, 14(10):667–668, 1971.
Soma Chaudhuri and Jennifer Welch. Bounds on the costs of register implementations. Technical report, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599–3175, 1990.
Prasad Jayanti. Optimal atomic register (in preparation). Technical report, Cornell University, Dept. of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, 1991.
Prasad Jayanti, Adarshpal Sethi, and Errol Lloyd. Minimal shared information for concurrent reading and writing. Technical report, University of Delaware, Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Del aware, Newark, DE 19716, 1990.
Leslie Lamport. Concurrent reading and writing. Communications of the ACM, 20(11):806–811, 1977.
Leslie Lamport. On interprocess communication, parts i and ii. Distributed Computing, 1:77–101, 1986.
Nancy A. Lynch. A hundred impossibility proofs for distributed computing. In The 8th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 1–27, 1989.
R. Newman-Wolf. A protocol for wait-free, atomic, multi-reader shared variables. In The 6th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 232–248, 1987.
G. Peterson and J. Burns. Concurrent reading while writing ii: the multi-writer case. In The 28th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, 1987.
Gary L. Peterson. Concurrent reading while writing. ACM TOPLAS, 5(1):56–65, 1983.
A. Singh, J. Anderson, and M. Gouda. The elusive atomic register, revisited. In The 6th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 206–221, 1987.
R. Schaffer. On the correctness of atomic multi-writer registers. Technical report, TR No: MIT/LCS/TM-364, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, 1988.
J.T. Tromp. How to construct an atomic variable. Technical report, Centrum Voor Wiskunde en Informatica, 1989.
P. Vitanyi and B. Awerbuch. Atomic shared register access by asynchronous hardware. In The 27th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, 1986.
K. Vidyasankar. Converting lamport's regular register to atomic register. IPL, 28:287–290, 1988.
K. Vidyasankar. An elegant 1-writer multireader multivalued atomic register. IPL, 30:221–223, 1989.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Jayanti, P., Sethi, A., Lloyd, E.L. (1992). Minimal shared information for concurrent reading and writing. In: Toueg, S., Spirakis, P.G., Kirousis, L. (eds) Distributed Algorithms. WDAG 1991. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 579. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0022449
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0022449
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55236-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46789-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive