Summary: Disentangling Multi­object Operations
(Extended Abstract)
Yehuda Afek \Lambda Michael Merritt y Gadi Taubenfeld z Dan Touitou x
Abstract
We consider the problem of implementing atomic op­
erations on multiple shared memory objects, in systems
which directly support only single­object atomic oper­
ations. Our motivation is to design algorithms that
exhibit both low contention between concurrent oper­
ations and a high level of concurrency, by disentangling
long chains of conflicting operations. That is, operations
that access widely disjoint parts of a data structure, or
are widely separated in time, should not interfere with
each other.
The algorithm reported here extends and is based on
the work of Attiya and Dagan [AD96], where a non­
blocking solution is presented for two­object atomic op­
erations. For any number, k, we present a wait­free
solution for atomically accessing up to k objects. No­
tions of local contention and local step complexity are

Source: Afek, Yehuda - School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences