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Timeliness-based wait-freedom: a gracefully degrading progress condition

Published: 18 August 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We introduce a simple progress condition for shared object implementations that is gracefully degrading depending on the degree of synchrony in each run. This progress property, called timeliness-based wait-freedom, provides a gradual bridge between obstruction-freedom and wait-freedom in partially synchronous systems. We show that timeliness-based wait-freedom can be achieved with synchronization primitives that are very weak. More precisely, every object has a timeliness-based wait-free implementation that uses only abortable registers (which are weaker than safe registers). As part of this work, we present a new leader election primitive that processes can use to dynamically compete for leadership such that if there is at least one timely process among the current candidates for leadership, then a timely leader is eventually elected among the candidates. We also show that this primitive can be implemented using abortable registers.

References

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M. K. Aguilera and S. Toueg. Timeliness-based wait-freedom: a gracefully degrading progress condition. Full paper, in preparation.
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Cited By

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  • (2019)The computational structure of progress conditions and shared objectsDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-019-00356-033:2(103-123)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2019
  • (2017)Power-Aware Population Protocols2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS.2017.238(2067-2074)Online publication date: Jun-2017
  • (2011)Fork-Consistent constructions from registersProceedings of the 15th international conference on Principles of Distributed Systems10.1007/978-3-642-25873-2_20(283-298)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2011
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cover image ACM Conferences
PODC '08: Proceedings of the twenty-seventh ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
August 2008
474 pages
ISBN:9781595939890
DOI:10.1145/1400751
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 18 August 2008

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Author Tags

  1. abortable registers
  2. dynamic leader election
  3. graceful degradation
  4. memory contention
  5. obstruction-freedom
  6. shared memory
  7. universal constructions
  8. wait-freedom

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Cited By

View all
  • (2019)The computational structure of progress conditions and shared objectsDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-019-00356-033:2(103-123)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2019
  • (2017)Power-Aware Population Protocols2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS.2017.238(2067-2074)Online publication date: Jun-2017
  • (2011)Fork-Consistent constructions from registersProceedings of the 15th international conference on Principles of Distributed Systems10.1007/978-3-642-25873-2_20(283-298)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2011
  • (2010)The computational structure of progress conditionsProceedings of the 24th international conference on Distributed computing10.5555/1888781.1888813(221-235)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2010
  • (2010)On utilizing speed in networks of mobile agentsProceedings of the 29th ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS symposium on Principles of distributed computing10.1145/1835698.1835775(305-314)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2010
  • (2010)Adaptive progressDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-010-0106-422:5-6(303-334)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2010
  • (2010)The Computational Structure of Progress ConditionsDistributed Computing10.1007/978-3-642-15763-9_23(221-235)Online publication date: 2010
  • (2009)Partial synchrony based on set timelinessProceedings of the 28th ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing10.1145/1582716.1582737(102-110)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2009
  • (2009)Abortable Fork-Linearizable StorageProceedings of the 13th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems10.1007/978-3-642-10877-8_21(255-269)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2009
  • (2009)Contention-Sensitive Data Structures and AlgorithmsDistributed Computing10.1007/978-3-642-04355-0_17(157-171)Online publication date: 2009

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