Efficient Large Almost Wait-Free Single-Writer Multireader Atomic Registers

  • Authors:

  • Andrew Lutomirski;Victor Luchangco

  • Affiliations:

  • Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 and AMA Capital Management, LLC, Los Angeles CA 90067;Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Burlington MA 01803

  • Venue:
  • OPODIS '08 Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We present a nonblocking algorithm for implementing single-writer multireader atomic registers of arbitrary size given registers only large enough to hold a single word. The algorithm has several properties that make it practical: It is simple and has low memory overhead, readers do not write, write operations are wait-free, and read operations are almost wait-free. Specifically, to implement a register with w words, the algorithm uses N (w + O (1)) words, where N is a parameter of the algorithm. Write operations take amortized O (w ) and worst-case O (Nw ) steps, and a read operation completes in O (w (log(k + 2) + Nk ·2*** N )) steps, where k is the number of write operations it overlaps.