On the cost of uniform protocols whose memory consumption is adaptive to interval contention

• Authors: Burkhard Englert
• Venue: Theoretical Computer Science
• Year: 2009

Recently, we introduced a novel term, memory-adaptive, whose goal it is to capture what it means for a distributed protocol to most efficiently make use of its shared memory. We proved three results that relate to the memory-adaptive model in the uniform setting. We considered a store/release protocol where processes are required to store a value in shared MWMR memory so that it cannot be overwritten until it has been released by the process. We showed that there do not exist uniformly wait-free store/release protocols using only the basic operations read and write that are memory-adaptive to point contention. We further showed that there exists a uniformly wait-free store/release protocol using only the basic operations read, write, and read-modify-write that is memory-adaptive to interval contention and time-adaptive to total contention. This left a significant gap - it remained open as to whether there exists a uniform, memory adaptive to interval contention store/release protocol that only uses read/write (no read-modify-write) registers. In this paper, we close this gap by showing that no such protocol can exist. We furthermore illustrate the validity and practicality of the concept of memory adaptiveness by providing a uniform, memory-adaptive to interval contention store/release protocol for Network Attached Disks.