Authors
Pankaj Khanchandani, Roger Wattenhofer
Publication date
2020/11/1
Journal
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Volume
145
Pages
176-187
Publisher
Academic Press
Description
Herlihy showed that multiprocessors must support advanced atomic objects, such as compare-and-swap, to be able to solve any arbitrary synchronization task among any number of processes (Herlihy, 1991). Elementary objects such as read-write registers and fetch-and-add are fundamentally limited to at most two processes with respect to solving an arbitrary synchronization task. Later, it was also shown that simulating an advanced atomic object using elementary objects is impossible. However, Ellen et al. observed that the above impossibility assumes computation by synchronization objects instead of synchronization instructions applied on memory locations, which is how the actual multiprocessors compute (Ellen et al., 2016). Building on that observation, we show that two elementary instructions, such as max-write and half-max, can be much better than the advanced compare-and-swap instruction …
Total citations
202020212022112
Scholar articles
P Khanchandani, R Wattenhofer - Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 2020