Computing with Reads and Writes in the Absence of Step Contention

Abstract

This paper studies implementations of concurrent objects that exploit the absence of step contention. These implementations use only reads and writes when a process is running solo. The other processes might be busy with other objects, swapped-out, failed, or simply delayed by a contention manager. We study in this paper two classes of such implementations, according to how they handle the case of step contention. The first kind, called obstruction-free implementations, are not required to terminate in that case. The second kind, called solo-fast implementations, terminate using powerful operations (e.g., C&S).

We present a generic obstruction-free object implementation that has a linear contention-free step complexity (number of reads and writes taken by a process running solo) and uses a linear number of read/write objects. We show that these complexities are asymptotically optimal, and hence generic obstruction-free implementations are inherently slow. We also prove that obstruction-free implementations cannot be gracefully degrading, namely, be nonblocking when the contention manager operates correctly, and remain (at least) obstruction-free when the contention manager misbehaves.

Finally, we show that any object has a solo-fast implementation, based on a solo-fast implementation of consensus. The implementation has linear contention-free step complexity, and we conjecture solo-fast implementations must have non-constant step complexity, i.e., they are also inherently slow.