Summary: Nonatomic Mutual Exclusion with Local Spinning #
Yong­Jik Kim
Tmax Soft Research Center
272­6 Seohyeon­dong, Seongnam­si
Gyeonggi­do, Korea 463­824
Email: jick@tmax.co.kr
James H. Anderson
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599­3175
Email: anderson@cs.unc.edu
April 2003, Revised October 2005
Abstract
We present an N­process local­spin mutual exclusion algorithm, based on nonatomic reads and writes,
in which each process performs #(log N) remote memory references to enter and exit its critical section.
This algorithm is derived from Yang and Anderson's atomic tree­based local­spin algorithm in a way
that preserves its time complexity. No atomic read/write algorithm with better asymptotic worst­case
time complexity (under the remote­memory­references measure) is currently known. This suggests that
atomic memory is not fundamentally required if one is interested in worst­case time complexity.
The same cannot be said if one is interested in fast­path algorithms (in which contention­free time

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

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences