Relationships between communication models in networks using atomic registers

• Authors: Lisa Higham;Colette Johnen
• Venue: IPDPS'06 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Parallel and distributed processing
• Year: 2006

A distributed system is commonly modelled by a graph where nodes represent processors and there is an edge between two processors if and only if they can communicate directly. In shared-registers versions of this general dcscription, neighbouring processors communicate by reading or writing shared registers, where each read or write is one atomic step. Variants of shared register models occur in the literature. This paper defined two models of shared registers determined by selecting the register locations. In the atomic-state model, each processor has a register; in the atomic-link model, each communication link has a register. We determine under what conditions and with what robustness and/or failure-tolerance guarantees it is possible to transform a solution under the atomic-state model into a solution under the atomic-link model. The fault-tolcrant models considered in this paper are wait-freedom and self-stabilization. These questions are addressed by first establishing a framework for defining correct transformations, which may be useful for similar studies of the relationship between various models of distributed computationl.