At-most-once semantics in asynchronous shared memory

  • Authors:

  • Sotirios Kentros;Aggelos Kiayias;Nicolas Nicolaou;Alexander A. Shvartsman

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA;University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA;University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA;University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the twenty-first annual symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper investigates the feasibility of implementing at-most-once access semantics in a model where a collection of actions is to be performed by failure-prone, asynchronous shared-memory processes. We introduce the At-Most-Once problem for performing a set of n jobs using m processors, and we define the notion of efficiency for such protocols, called effectiveness, that allows the classification of algorithms solving the problem. The effectiveness for an at-most-once implementation is the number of jobs safely completed by the implementation, expressed as a function of the number of jobs n, the number of processes m, and the number of process crashes f. We prove a lower bound of n--f on the effectiveness of any algorithm. We then present two process solutions that offer a trade off between work and space complexity. Finally, we generalize a two-process solution for the multi-process setting using a hierarchical algorithm that achieves effectiveness of n--log m†o(n), coming reasonably close, asymptotically, to the corresponding lower bound.