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Summary: A Fast, Scalable Mutual Exclusion Algorithm
Jae-Heon Yang
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Mills College
Oakland, California 94613
James H. Anderson
Department of Computer Science
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3175
October 1993
Revised November 1994
Abstract
This paper is concerned with synchronization under read/write atomicity in shared memory multi-
processors. We present a new algorithm for N-process mutual exclusion that requires only read and write
operations and that has O(logN) time complexity, where \time" is measured by counting remote memory
references. The time complexity of this algorithm is better than that of all prior solutions to the mutual
exclusion problem that are based upon atomic read and write instructions in fact, the time complexity
of most prior solutions is unbounded. Performance studies are presented that show that our mutual
exclusion algorithm exhibits scalable performance under heavy contention. In fact, its performance rivals
that of the fastest queue-based spin locks based on strong primitives such as compare-and-swap and
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