A New Characterization of Atomic Registers shared-memory

Antoine Gaillard (1)

1 LIX - Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École polytechnique [Palaiseau]

We study the fundamental communication properties of two major shared-memory models, namely the ones in which processes communicate via Single-Writer/Multi-Reader (SWMR for short) atomic registers and Atomic-Snapshot object, respectively. In 1998, Gafni already adressed this question. We prove in this paper that the characterization he gave does not match the well-known equivalence between these two models. The formalism we use is the HO model developed by Charron-Bost and Schiper, in which the features of a specific system (degree of synchrony, failure model...) are encapsulated into a single abstract entity, called a "communication predicate". In particular, we give a new characterization of SWMR and Atomic-Snapshot models only in terms of the predicates that capture the properties of their communications. Moreover, we prove that our characterization is consistent regarding the equivalence result mentioned above.

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Antoine Gaillard. A New Characterization of Atomic Registers shared-memory. 2008. ⟨hal-00294595⟩