Bounded concurrent time-stamping

Danny Dolev*, Nir Shavit

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

46 Scopus citations

Abstract

We introduce concurrent time-stamping, a paradigm that allows processes to temporally order concurrent events in an asynchronous shared-memory system. Concurrent time-stamp systems are powerful tools for concurrency control, serving as the basis for solutions to coordination problems such as mutual exclusion, ℓ-exclusion, randomized consensus, and multiwriter multireader atomic registers. Unfortunately, all previously known methods for implementing concurrent time-stamp systems have been theoretically unsatisfying since they require unbounded-size time-stamps - in other words, unbounded-size memory. This work presents the first bounded implementation of a concurrent time-stamp system, providing a modular unbounded-to-bounded transformation of the simple unbounded solutions to problems such as those mentioned above. It allows solutions to two formerly open problems, the bounded-probabilistic-consensus problem of Abrahamson and the fifo-ℓ-exclusion problem of Fischer, Lynch, Burns and Borodin, and a more efficient construction of multireader multiwriter atomic registers.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)418-455
Number of pages38
JournalSIAM Journal on Computing
Volume26
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 1997

Keywords

  • Atomic registers
  • Concurrency
  • Distributed computing
  • Parallel computing
  • Serialization
  • Time-stamping

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Bounded concurrent time-stamping'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this