| | |
Summary: A Time Complexity Lower Bound for Adaptive Mutual
Exclusion
Yong-Jik Kim
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Email: yongjik@gmail.com
James H. Anderson
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175
Email: anderson@cs.unc.edu
September 2005, revised May 2007, December 2010, and August 2011
Abstract
We consider the time complexity of adaptive mutual exclusion algorithms, where "time" is measured
by counting the number of remote memory references required per critical-section access. For systems that
support (only) read, write, and comparison primitives (such as compare-and-swap), we establish a lower
bound that precludes a deterministic algorithm with o(k) time complexity, where k is point contention. In
particular, it is impossible to construct a deterministic O(log k) algorithm based on such primitives.
Work supported by NSF grants CCR 9732916, CCR 9972211, CCR 9988327, ITR 0082866, and CCR 0208289. This work
|
