Summary.
Concurrent systems in which there is a known upper bound Δ on memory access time are considered. Two prototypical synchronization problems, mutual exclusion and consensus, are studied, and solutions that have constant (i.e. independent of Δ and the total number of processes) time complexity in the absence of contention are presented. For mutual exclusion, in the absence of contention, a process needs only five accesses to the shared memory to enter its critical section, and in the presence of contention, the winning process may need to delay itself for 4 ⋅ Δ time units. For consensus, in absence of contention, a process decides after four accesses to the shared memory, and in the presence of contention, it may need to delay itself for Δ time units.
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Received: July 1993/Accepted: February 1996
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Alur, R., Taubenfeld, G. Fast timing-based algorithms. Distrib Comput 10, 1–10 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/s004460050020
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s004460050020