Summary: Synchronization power depends on the register size
(Preliminary Version)
Yehuda Afek Gideon Stupp
AT&T Bell Laboratories and
Department of Computer Science Department of Computer Science
Tel­Aviv University Tel­Aviv University
Israel 69978 Israel 69978
Abstract
Though it is common practice to treat synchroniza­
tion primitives for multiprocessors as abstract data
types, they are in reality machine instructions on regis­
ters. A crucial theoretical question with practical im­
plications is the relationship between the size of the
register and its computational power. We wish to
study this question and choose as a first target the
popular compare&swap operation (which is the basis
for many modern multiprocessor architectures). Our
main results are:
1. We show that multi­valued consensus among n
processes can be solved using a compare&swap reg­

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

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences