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On the inherent weakness of conditional primitives

  • Special Issue PODC 04
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Abstract

Some well-known primitive operations, such as compare-and-swap, can be used, together with read and write, to implement any object in a wait-free manner. However, this paper shows that, for a large class of objects, including counters, queues, stacks, and single-writer snapshots, wait-free implementations using only these primitive operations and a large class of other primitive operations cannot be space efficient: the number of base objects required is at least linear in the number of processes that share the implemented object. The same lower bounds are obtained for implementations of starvation-free mutual exclusion using only primitive operations from this class. For wait-free implementations of a closely related class of one-time objects, lower bounds on the tradeoff between time and space are presented.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Faith Ellen Fich & Danny Hendler

  2. Computer Science, Department Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel Scalable Synchronization Research Group, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Burlington, MA

    Nir Shavit

  3. Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management Technion, Haifa, Israel

    Danny Hendler

Authors
  1. Faith Ellen Fich
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  2. Danny Hendler
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  3. Nir Shavit
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Correspondence to Faith Ellen Fich.

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Fich, F.E., Hendler, D. & Shavit, N. On the inherent weakness of conditional primitives. Distrib. Comput. 18, 267–277 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-005-0136-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-005-0136-5

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