Asynchronous group mutual exclusion (extended abstract)

Abstract

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.

Uniform Solvability with a Finite Number of MWMR Registers

“…Generalized weak-test-and-set is related to group mutual exclusion [30], much in the same way that weak-test-and-set is related to mutual exclusion. Group mutual exclusion is a generalization of mutual exclusion in which multiple processors may enter the critical section simultaneously, provided they are part of the same group.…”

Permission Based Group Mutual Exclusion Algorithms for a Cluster Tree Network

“…In terms of the maximal number of processes in a group, two classes of mutual exclusion problem are distinguished in the literature. The first class, called the basic mutual exclusion problem [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], where the maximum size of groups is one, and the second class called group mutual exclusion (GME) problem, where every group can have more than one process [1,10,11,12,13,14,15,16].…”

Group mutual exclusion in O (log n ) RMR

“…Earlier works [16,22,23] have proposed the so-called "capturing mechanisms" to boost concurrency. Roughly speaking, these mechanisms allow a process to check whether other active processes are its fellow processes before it enters the CS itself, and if so, to help them enter.…”

“…The property of concurrent entering, informally stated by Joung [22], and made precise by Hadzilacos [15], is a critical property of GME. Without it, any ordinary mutual exclusion algorithm solves GME easily.…”

“…The GROUP MUTUAL EXCLUSION problem (GME), introduced by Joung [22], generalizes MUTUAL EXCLUSION. In GME, n pro-(P3).…”