Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Wait-free computing

  • Invited Papers
  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Distributed Algorithms (WDAG 1995)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 972))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

This tutorial has two independent parts. The first part (Sections 1, 2, 3, and 4) is aimed at introducing beginning graduate students to the subject of wait-free synchronization. It explores some important questions that have been studied and the techniques to solve them. The second part (Section 5) is a tutorial on robust wait-free hierarchies. It explains the motivation for studying such hierarchies and presents known results on this subject in one unified framework.

Work supported by NSF grant CCR-9410421 and Dartmouth College Startup grant.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. H. Attiya, A. Bar-Noy, and D. Dolev. Sharing memory robustly in message-passing systems. Journal of the ACM, 42(1):124–142, January 1995.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. E. Borowsky and E. Gafni. Generalized FLP result for t-resilient asynchronous computations. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pages 91–100, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  3. E. Borowsky and E. Gafni. The implication of the Borowski-Gafni simulation on the set consensus hierarchy. Technical Report Technical Report 930021, UCLA Computer Science Department, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  4. E. Borowsky, E. Gafni, and Y. Afek. Consensus power makes (some) sense. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 363–372, August 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  5. B. Bloom. Constructing two writer atomic registers. In Proceedings of the 6th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 249–259, 1987.

    Google Scholar 

  6. O. Biran, S. Moran, and S. Zaks. A combinatorial characterization of the distributed 1-solvable tasks. Journal of Algorithms, 11:420–440, 1990.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. R. Bazzi, G. Neiger, and G. Peterson. On the use of registers in achieving wait-free consensus. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 354–363, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  8. S. Chaudhuri. Agreement is harder than consensus: Set consensus problems in totally asynchronous systems. In Proceedings of the 9th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 311–324, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  9. T. Chandra, V. Hadzilacos, P. Jayanti, and S. Toueg. Wait-freedom vs. t-resiliency and and the robustness of wait-free hierarchies. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 334–343, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  10. P.J. Courtois, F. Heymans, and D.L. Parnas. Concurrent control with readers and writers. Communications of the ACM, 14(10):667–668, 1971.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. B. Chor, A. Israeli, and M. Li. On processor coordination using asynchronous hardware. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 86–97, August 1987.

    Google Scholar 

  12. R. Cori and S. Moran. Exotic behavior of consensus numbers. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Distributed Algorithms, Terschelling, The Netherlands, pages 101–115, September–October 1994. Appeared in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Number 857, Springer-Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  13. D. Dolev, C. Dwork, and L. Stockmeyer. On the minimal synchronism needed for distributed consensus. Journal of the ACM, 34(1):77–97, January 1987.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. M. Fischer, N. Lynch, and M. Paterson. Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process. JACM, 32(2):374–382, 1985.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. M. P. Herlihy. A methodology for implementing highly concurrent data structures. In Proceedings of the 2th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, pages 197–206, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  16. M.P. Herlihy. Wait-free synchronization. ACM TOPLAS, 13(1):124–149, 1991.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. M. P. Herlihy. A methodology for implementing highly concurrent data objects. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 15(5):745–770, November 1993.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. M. P. Herlihy and S. Rajsbaum. Set consensus using arbitrary objects. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 324–333, August 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  19. M. P. Herlihy and N. Shavit. The asynchronous computability theorem for t-resilient tasks. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pages 111–120, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  20. M. P. Herlihy and N. Shavit. The topological structure of asynchronous computability. Draft, October 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  21. M.P. Herlihy and J.M. Wing. Linearizability: A correctness condition for concurrent objects. ACM TOPLAS, 12(3):463–492, 1990.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. A. Israeli and A. Shaham. Optimal multi-writer multi-reader atomic register. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 71–82, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  23. P. Jayanti. On the robustness of Herlihy's hierarchy. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, August 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  24. P. Jayanti. Solvability of consensus: composition breaks down for nondeterministic types. SIAM Journal of Computing, 1995. Accepted for publication.

    Google Scholar 

  25. P. Jayanti and S. Toueg. Some results on the impossibility, universality, and decidability of consensus. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Distributed Algorithms, Haifa, Israel, November 1992. Appeared in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, No. 647.

    Google Scholar 

  26. J. Kleinberg and S. Mullainathan. Resource bounds and combinations of consensus objects. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, August 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  27. M.C. Loui and H.H. Abu-Amara. Memory requirements for agreement among unreliable asynchronous processes. Advances in computing research, 4:163–183, 1987.

    Google Scholar 

  28. L. Lamport. Concurrent reading and writing. Communications of the ACM, 20(11):806–811, 1977.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. L. Lamport. On interprocess communication, parts i and ii. Distributed Computing, 1:77–101, 1986.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. W. Lo. More on t-resilience vs. wait-freedom. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, August 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  31. N. A. Lynch and M. Tuttle. An introduction to input/output automata. Technical Report MIT/LCS/TM-373, MIT, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, 1988.

    Google Scholar 

  32. M. Li, J. Tromp, and P. Vitanyi. How to construct wait-free variables. In Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 372, 1989.

    Google Scholar 

  33. J.M. Mellor-Crummey and M.L. Scott. Algorithms for scalable synchronization on shared-memory multiprocessors. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 9(1):21–65, February 1991.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. R. Newman-Wolfe. A protocol for wait-free, atomic, multi-reader shared variables. In Proceedings of the 6th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 232–248, 1987.

    Google Scholar 

  35. G.L. Peterson and J. Burns. Concurrent reading while writing ii: the multiwriter case. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, 1987.

    Google Scholar 

  36. G. Peterson, R. Bazzi, and G. Neiger. A gap theorem for consensus types. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 344–353, August 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  37. G. L. Peterson. Concurrent reading while writing. ACM TOPLAS, 5(1):56–65, 1983.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. O. Rachman. Anomalies in the wait-free hierarchy. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Distributed Algorithms, Terschelling, The Netherlands, pages 156–163, September–October 1994. Appeared in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Number 857, Springer-Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  39. M. Raynal. Algorithms for mutual exclusion. MIT Press Series in Scientific Computation, 1986. Translated from French by D. Beeson.

    Google Scholar 

  40. A. Singh, J. Anderson, and M. Gouda. The elusive atomic register, revisited. In Proceedings of the 6th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 206–221, 1987.

    Google Scholar 

  41. R. Schaffer. On the correctness of atomic multi-writer registers. Technical report, TR No: MIT/LCS/TM-364, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, 1988.

    Google Scholar 

  42. M. Saks and F. Zaharoglou. Wait-free k-set agreement is impossible: The topology of public knowledge. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pages 101–110, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  43. P. Vitanyi and B. Awerbuch. Atomic shared register access by asynchronous hardware. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, 1986.

    Google Scholar 

  44. K. Vidyasankar. Converting lamport's regular register to atomic register. IPL, 28:287–290, 1988.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dartmouth College, 03755, Hanover, NH, USA

    Prasad Jayanti

Authors
  1. Prasad Jayanti
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Jean-Michel Hélary Michel Raynal

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Jayanti, P. (1995). Wait-free computing. In: Hélary, JM., Raynal, M. (eds) Distributed Algorithms. WDAG 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 972. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0022136

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0022136

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60274-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44783-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation