Mutual exclusion and concurrency are two fundamental and essentially opposite features in distributed systems. However, in some applications such as Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) we have found it necessary to impose mutual exclusion on different groups of processes in accessing a resource, while allowing processes of the same group to share the resource. To our knowledge, no such design issue has been previously raised in the literature.In this paper we address this issue by presenting a new problem, called Congenial Talking Philosophers, to model group mutual exclusion. We also propose several criteria to evaluate solutions of the problem and to measure their performance. Finally, we provide an efficient and highly concurrent distributed algorithm for the problem in a shared-memory model where processes communicate by reading from and writing to shared variables. The distributed algorithm meets the proposed criteria, and has performance similar to some naive but centralized solutions to the problem.

Mutual exclusion and coucurreucy are two fuudameutal and essentially opposite features in distributed systems. However, in some applications such as computer supported cooperative works (CSCW) we have found it necessary to impose mutual exclusion on different groups of processes in accessing a resource, while allowing processes of the same group to share the resource. To our knowledge, no such design issue has been raised in the literature.Our contributions of the paper are to present a new problem, which we refer to as the Congenial Talking Philosophers, to model the design issue for concurrency while mutual exclusion. We also propose several criteria to evaluate solutions of the problem and to measure their performance. Finally, we provide an efficient and highly concurrent distributed algorithm for the problem in a shared-memory model where processes communicate by reading from and writing to shared variables. The distributed algorithm meets the proposed criteria and has a similar performance as some naive but centralized solutions to the problem.

Group mutual exclusion occurs naturally in situations where a resource can be shared by processes of the same group, but not by processes of different groups. For example, suppose data is stored in a CD-jukebox. Then when a disc is loaded for access, users that need data on the disc can concurrently access the disc, while users that need data on a different disc have to wait until the current disc is unloaded.The design issues for group mutual exclusion have been modeled as the Congenial Talking Philosophers problem, and solutions for shared-memory models have been proposed [12,14]. As in ordinary mutual exclusion and many other problems in distributed systems, however, techniques developed for shared memory do not necessary apply to message passing (and vice versa). So in this paper we investigate solutions for Congenial Talking Philosophers in computer networks where processes communicate by asynchronous message passing. We first present a solution that is a straightforward adaptation from Ricart and Agrawala's algorithm for ordinary mutual exclusion. Then we show that the simple modification suffers a severe performance degradation that could cause the system to behave as though only one process of a group can be in the critical section at a time. We then present a more efficient and highly concurrent distributed algorithm for the problem, the first such solution in computer networks.

We propose a quorum system, which we referred to as the surficial quorum system, for group mutual exclusion. The surficial quorum system is geometrically evident and is easy to construct. It also has a nice structure based on which a truly distributed algorithm for group mutual exclusion can be obtained and processes' loads can be minimized. When used with Maekawa's algorithm, the surficial quorum system allows up to ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi 2n mðmÀ1Þ q processes to access a resource simultaneously, where n is the total number of processes and m is the total number of groups. We also present two modifications of Maekawa's algorithm so that the number of processes that can access a resource at a time is not limited to the structure of the underlying quorum system, but to the number that the problem definition allows.