The collective memory of amnesic processes

  • Authors:

  • Rachid Guerraoui;Ron R. Levy;Bastian Pochon;Jim Pugh

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland;School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland;School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland;School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This article considers the problem of robustly emulating a shared atomic memory over a distributed message-passing system where processes can fail by crashing and possibly recover. We revisit the notion of atomicity in the crash-recovery context and introduce a generic algorithm that emulates an atomic memory. The algorithm is instantiated for various settings according to whether processes have access to local stable storage, and whether, in every execution of the algorithm, a sufficient number of processes are assumed not to crash. We establish the optimality of specific instances of our algorithm in terms of resilience, log complexity (number of stable storage accesses needed in every read or write operation), as well as time complexity (number of communication steps needed in every read or write operation). The article also discusses the impact of considering a multiwriter versus a single-writer memory, as well as the impact of weakening the consistency of the memory by providing safe or regular semantics instead of atomicity.