Summary: Time/Contention Trade­offs for Multiprocessor
Synchronization \Lambda
James H. Anderson
Department of Computer Science
The University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599­3175
Jae­Heon Yang
Department of Computer Science
The University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland 20742­3255
May 1994
Revised May 1995
Abstract
We establish trade­offs between time complexity and write­ and access­contention for solutions to
the mutual exclusion problem. The write­contention (access­contention) of a concurrent program is the
number of processes that may be simultaneously enabled to write (access by reading and/or writing) the
same shared variable. Our notion of time complexity distinguishes between local and remote accesses of
shared memory.
We show that, for any N­process mutual exclusion algorithm, if write­contention is w, and if at most
v remote variables can be accessed by a single atomic operation, then there exists an execution involving

Source: Anderson, James - Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences