The Mailbox Problem

Authors:
Marcos K. Aguilera;Eli Gafni;Leslie Lamport
Affiliations:
Microsoft Research Silicon Valley,;Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, and UCLA,;Microsoft Research Silicon Valley,
Venue:
DISC '08 Proceedings of the 22nd international symposium on Distributed Computing
Year:
2008

Citing 7
Cited 2

Linearizability: a correctness condition for concurrent objects

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Wait-free synchronization

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process

Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Bounded Concurrent Time-Stamping

SIAM Journal on Computing
A new solution of Dijkstra's concurrent programming problem

Communications of the ACM
TRAFFIC CONTROL IN A MULTIPLEXED COMPUTER

TRAFFIC CONTROL IN A MULTIPLEXED COMPUTER
Bounded time-stamps

Distributed Computing

Model Checking Linearizability via Refinement

FM '09 Proceedings of the 2nd World Congress on Formal Methods
More anti-chain based refinement checking

ICFEM'12 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Formal Engineering Methods: formal methods and software engineering

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We propose and solve a synchronization problem called the mailbox problem, motivated by the interaction between devices and processor in a computer. In this problem, a postman delivers letters to the mailbox of a housewife and uses a flag to signal a non-empty mailbox. The wife must remove all letters delivered to the mailbox and should not walk to the mailbox if it is empty. We present algorithms and an impossibility result for this problem.