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On the inherent weakness of conditional primitives

On the inherent weakness of conditional primitives 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. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Distributed Computing Springer Journals

On the inherent weakness of conditional primitives

Fich, Faith; Hendler, Danny; Shavit, Nir
Distributed Computing , Volume 18 (4) – Nov 2, 2005
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11 pages

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References (11)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by Springer-Verlag
Subject
Computer Science; Computer Hardware; Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks; Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems; Theory of Computation; Computer Communication Networks
ISSN
0178-2770
eISSN
1432-0452
DOI
10.1007/s00446-005-0136-5
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

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.

Journal

Distributed Computing – Springer Journals

Published: Nov 2, 2005

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