TY - GEN
T1 - Toward a non-atomic era
T2 - 20th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 1988
AU - Dolev, Danny
AU - Gafni, Eli
AU - Shavit, Nir
PY - 1988
Y1 - 1988
N2 - Most of the research in concurrency control has been based on the existence of strong syrchronization primitives such as test and set. Following Lamport, recent research promoting the use of weaker primitives, "safe" rather than "atomic," has resulted in construction of atomic registers from safe ones, in the belief that they would be useful tools for process synchronization. We argue that the properties provided by atomic operations may be too powerful, masking core difficulties of problems and leading to inefficiency. We therefore advocate a different approach, to skip the intermediate step of achieving atomicity, and solve problems directly from safe registers. Though it has been shown that "test and set" cannot be implemented from safe registers, we show how to achieve a fair solution to l-exclusion, a classical concurrency control problem previously solved assuming a very powerful form of atomic "test and set". We do so using safe registers alone and without introducing atomicity. The solution is based on the construction of a simple novel non-atomic synchronization primitive.
AB - Most of the research in concurrency control has been based on the existence of strong syrchronization primitives such as test and set. Following Lamport, recent research promoting the use of weaker primitives, "safe" rather than "atomic," has resulted in construction of atomic registers from safe ones, in the belief that they would be useful tools for process synchronization. We argue that the properties provided by atomic operations may be too powerful, masking core difficulties of problems and leading to inefficiency. We therefore advocate a different approach, to skip the intermediate step of achieving atomicity, and solve problems directly from safe registers. Though it has been shown that "test and set" cannot be implemented from safe registers, we show how to achieve a fair solution to l-exclusion, a classical concurrency control problem previously solved assuming a very powerful form of atomic "test and set". We do so using safe registers alone and without introducing atomicity. The solution is based on the construction of a simple novel non-atomic synchronization primitive.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84899000728&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/62212.62220
DO - 10.1145/62212.62220
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AN - SCOPUS:84899000728
SN - 0897912640
SN - 9780897912648
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing
SP - 78
EP - 92
BT - Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 1988
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 2 May 1988 through 4 May 1988
ER -