Constructing 1-writer multireader multivalued atomic variables from regular variables

Abstract

A simple wait-free construction of 1-writer multireader multivalued atomic variable from multireader regular variables is presented in this paper. A key point of the construction is the use of an elegant forwarding technique to overcome the new-old inversion property inherent in regular variables.Another construction, using a different forwarding technique, is also given. This technique is a refinement of one proposed in the literature. Formal correctness proofs for both the constructions are short and easy to follow.

Almost Optimal Single Reader, Single Writer Atomic Register

“…The problem of implementing an n-valued atomic register from regular registers was defined and first studied by Lamport [Lam86] and later by Burns and Peterson [BP87a,BP87b], Newman-Wolfe [NW87], Tromp [Tro89], Vidyasankar [Vid89,Vid96], and Haldar and Vidyasankar [HV95]. The implementation in [Lam86] requires a 2n(n+2) valued regular register, written by the writer, and a 2-valued regular register, written by the reader.…”

“…The implementation in [Lam86] requires a 2n(n+2) valued regular register, written by the writer, and a 2-valued regular register, written by the reader. The implementations in [BP87a], [NW87], [Vid89], and [HV95] are all for multiple readers. Specializing them to the single reader case, the implementation in [BP87a] requires two n-valued regular registers, written by the writer, and one 3-valued regular register, written by the reader.…”

Multiword atomic read/write registers on multiprocessor systems

“…This problem, also known as the problem of multiword wait-free read/write registers, has become one of the well-studied problems in the area of nonblocking synchronization, with numerous results for the construction of, for example, (1) single-writer single-reader registers [Lamport 1986;Simpson 1990;Chen and Burns 1997]; (2) single-writer n-reader registers [Peterson 1983;Burns and Peterson 1987;Kirousis et al 1987;Newman-Wolfe 1987;Kopetz and Reisinge 1993;Singh et al 1994;Haldar and Vidyasankar 1995;Larsson et al 2004]; (3) 2-writer n-reader registers [Bloom 1988]; and (4) m-writer n-reader registers [Vitányi and Awerbuch 1986;Peterson and Burns 1987;Israeli and Shaham 1992;Li and Vitányi 1992;Li et al 1996;Haldar and Vidyasankar 1996].…”

Implementing a Register in a Dynamic Distributed System

“…This means that it is possible to implement a multi-writer/multi-reader atomic register from single-writer/single-reader safe registers. There is a huge number of papers in the literature discussing such transformations (e.g., [5,7,16,21,27,29,30] to cite a few).…”