Abstract
We consider three popular types of shared memory that support one of the following sets of operations: {CAS, read, write}, {LL, SC, VL, read, write}, or {RLL, RSC, read, write}. We present algorithms that, together with Moir's [Moi97], efficiently implement each shared memory above from any of the other two. Our implementations are wait-free and have constant time and space complexity. Thus, concurrent programs developed for one of the above memories can be ported to any other without incurring any increase in time complexity. Further, since our implementations are wait-free, a wait-free concurrent program remains wait-free even after porting.
This work is similar in spirit to [IR94, AM95, Moi97]. The main difference is that in these earlier works the write operation is not included in the set of implemented operations. Specifically, earlier works implement {CAS, read} from {LL, SC} and vice versa, but to our knowledge there are no existing implementations of either of {CAS, read, write} and {LL, SC, VL, read, write} from the other. Consequently, it is not possible to port concurrent programs between systems supporting {CAS, read, write} and {LL, SC, VL, read, write}. The implementations in this paper help overcome this drawback.
At first glance, adding write to the set of implemented operations might appear easy. However, there is ample evidence to suggest that simple modifications to earlier implementations do not work. Our implementations are therefore quite different from the ones in earlier works.
This work is partially supported by NSF RIA grant CCR-9410421.
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Jayanti, P. (1998). A complete and constant time wait-free implementation of CAS from LL/SC and vice versa. In: Kutten, S. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1499. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0056485
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0056485
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