Atomicity: Formal Definition and Properties

Abstract

Atomicity is a consistency condition, i.e., it allows us to answer the following question: Is this implementation of a concurrent object correct? The atomicity notion for read/write registers was introduced in Chap. 1, where algorithms that solve the mutual exclusion problem (i.e., algorithms which implement lock objects) were presented. Chap. 3 presented semaphore objects and programming language constructs which allow designers of concurrent objects to benefit from lock objects.