Summary: Atomic Snapshots of Shared Memory
YEHUDA AFEK
Tel­Aviv University, Tel­Aviv, Israel and AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey
HAGIT ATTIYA
Technion, Haifa, Israel
DANNY DOLEV
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel and IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California
ELI GAFNI
Tel­Aviv University, Tel­Aviv, Israel and University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles,
California
MICHAEL MERRITT
AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey
AND NIR SHAVIT
IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California and Stanford University, Stanford, California
Abstract. This paper introduces a general formulation of atomic snapshot memory, a shared memory parti­
tioned into words written (updated) by individual processes, or instantaneously read (scanned) in its entirety.
This paper presents three wait­free implementations of atomic snapshot memory. The first implementation
in this paper uses unbounded (integer) fields in these registers, and is particularly easy to understand. The
second implementation uses bounded registers. Its correctness proof follows the ideas of the unbounded
implementation. Both constructions implement a single­writer snapshot memory, in which each word may

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

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences