Summary: Universal Constructions for Multi­Object Operations \Lambda
(Extended Abstract)
James H. Anderson and Mark Moir
Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599­3175
Abstract
We present wait­free and lock­free universal construc­
tions that allow operations to access multiple objects
atomically. Such constructions provide functionality
similar to nested critical sections in conventional, lock­
based systems. In such a system, two critical sections
might be nested, for example, to swap the contents of
two shared buffers. Using our constructions, such a
transfer can be done in a wait­free or a lock­free manner.
Our universal constructions are based upon multi­
word synchronization primitives. In the first part of
the paper, we present wait­free implementations of such
primitives from one­word primitives. These imple­
mentations allow processes that access disjoint words
to execute in parallel. Previous implementations of
multi­word primitives either overly restrict parallelism,

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

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences