The renaming problem in shared memory systems: An introduction

Abstract

Exploring the power of shared memory communication objects and models, and the limits of distributed computability are among the most exciting research areas of distributed computing. In that spirit, this paper focuses on a problem that has received considerable interest since its introduction in 1987, namely the renaming problem. It was the rst non-trivial problem known to be solvable in an asynchronous distributed system despite process failures. Many algorithms for renaming and variants of renaming have been proposed, and sophisticated lower bounds have been proved, that have been a source of new ideas of general interest to distributed computing. It has consequently acquired a paradigm status in distributed fault-tolerant computing. In the renaming problem, processes start with unique initial names taken from a large name space and decide new names such that no two processes decide the same new name and the new names are from a name space as small as possible. This paper presents an introduction to the renaming problem in shared memory systems, for non-expert readers. It describes both algorithms and lower bounds. Also, it discusses strong connections relating renaming and other important distributed problems such as set agreement and symmetry breaking.

Convergence and covering on graphs for wait-free robots

“…Coordination problems in distributed computing can be about reaching agreement, often referred to as colorless problems [8] such as consensus, loop agreement, set agreement, graph convergence, or more generally robot convergence, or they can deal with reaching disagreement, which is usually much more difficult to analyze [19] as in weak symmetry breaking [11,19,25], renaming [4,12] or committee decision [13].…”

Asynchronous Coordination Under Preferences and Constraints

“…Since its introduction, the renaming problem has been extensively studied (see for example [5,10,19]). It was initially introduced as a non-adaptive problem in which processes just need to pick distinct output names in the space [1, .…”

Increasing the Power of the Iterated Immediate Snapshot Model with Failure Detectors

“…For the interested reader, a recursive algorithm implementing the operation write_snapshot() is described in [5,11].…”

“…The operation write_snapshot() can be wait-free implemented from atomic read/write registers (i.e., in the base read/write model (e.g., [3,5]). Hence, it does not add computational power to the read/write model.…”

“…When a process invokes propose (v i ) where v i is the value it proposes, it first initializes its local variables (line 1). Then it enters an infinite loop (lines [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Within the loop, the behavior of a process p i can be decomposed into three phases.…”