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Universal constructions that ensure disjoint-access parallelism and wait-freedom

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Abstract

A universal construction is a general mechanism for obtaining a concurrent implementation of an object from its sequential code. We show that there is no universal construction that is both disjoint-access parallel (guaranteeing the processes operating on different parts of an implemented object do not interfere with one another) and wait-free (guaranteeing progress for each nonfaulty process when accessing an object). In contrast, we present a universal construction which results in disjoint-access parallel, wait-free implementations of any object provided there is a bound on the number of data items accessed by each operation supported by the object.

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Acknowledgments

Faith Ellen was supported in part by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Panagiota Fatourou was supported by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Program through the TransForm (FP7-MC-ITN-238639), HiPEAC2 (FP7-ICT-217068), HiPEAC3 (FP7-ICT-287759), Euroserver(FP7-ICT-610456), and ENCORE (FP7-ICT-248647) projects and by the ARISTEIA Action of the Operational Program Education and Lifelong Learning through the GreenVM project. Eleftherios Kosmas was supported by the project “IRAKLITOS II - University of Crete” of the Operational Programme for Education and Lifelong Learning 2007–2013 (E.P.E.D.V.M.) of the NSRF (2007–2013), co-funded by the European Union (European Social Fund) and National Resources. Alessia Milani and Panagiota Fatourou were supported in part by the EURO-TM cost action IC001. Alessia Milani and Corentin Travers were supported in part by the ANR project DISPLEXITY. Some of the work was done while Faith Ellen, Alessia Milani and Corentin Travers were visiting FORTH ICS, Crete, Greece, and while Faith Ellen and Eleftherios Kosmas were visiting Labri, Bordeaux, France. The visit of Faith Ellen was supported in part by the Embassy of France in Canada.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, 10 King’s College Road, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Faith Ellen

  2. Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), N. Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, 70013, Heraklion, Crete Island, Greece

    Panagiota Fatourou & Eleftherios Kosmas

  3. University of Crete, Voutes Campus, 70013, Heraklion, Crete Island, Greece

    Panagiota Fatourou & Eleftherios Kosmas

  4. LaBRI, University of Bordeaux and CNRS, 33400, Talence, France

    Alessia Milani & Corentin Travers

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  1. Faith Ellen
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  2. Panagiota Fatourou
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  3. Eleftherios Kosmas
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  4. Alessia Milani
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  5. Corentin Travers
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Correspondence to Corentin Travers.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this work appeared in the Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), 2012, pp. 115–124.

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Ellen, F., Fatourou, P., Kosmas, E. et al. Universal constructions that ensure disjoint-access parallelism and wait-freedom. Distrib. Comput. 29, 251–277 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-015-0261-8

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