WDAG 1989: Distributed Algorithms pp 254-267 | Cite as

Possibility and impossibility results in a shared memory environment

  • Gadi Taubenfeld
  • Shlomo Moran
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 392)

Abstract

We focus on unreliable asynchronous shared memory model which support only atomic read and write operations. For such a model we provide a necessary condition for the solvability of problems in the precence of multiple undetectable crash failures. Also, by using game-theoretical notions, a necessary and sufficient condition is provided, for the solvability of problems in the precence of multiple undetectable initial failures

Our results imply that many problems such as consensus, choosing a leader, ranking, matching and sorting are unsolvable in the presence of a single crash failure, and that variants of these problems are solvable in the presence of t − 1 crash failures but not in the presence of t crash failures.

We show that a shared memory model simulate various message passing models, and hence our impossibility results hold also for those message passing models. Our results extend and generalize known impossibility results for various asynchronous models.

Keywords

Shared Memory Atomic Step Impossibility Result Initial Failure Consensus Problem 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1989

Authors and Affiliations

  • Gadi Taubenfeld
    • 1
  • Shlomo Moran
    • 2
  1. 1.Computer Science DepartmentYale UniversityNew Haven
  2. 2.Computer Science Department TechnionHaifaIsrael

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