ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Fast deterministic consensus in a noisy environment
Proceedings of the nineteenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Fast deterministic consensus in a noisy environment
Journal of Algorithms
Lower Bounds in Distributed Computing
DISC '00 Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Distributed Computing
Hundreds of impossibility results for distributed computing
Distributed Computing - Papers in celebration of the 20th anniversary of PODC
Randomized protocols for asynchronous consensus
Distributed Computing - Papers in celebration of the 20th anniversary of PODC
Light-weight leases for storage-centric coordination
International Journal of Parallel Programming
The notion of a timed register and its application to indulgent synchronization
Proceedings of the nineteenth annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures
Constructing shared objects that are both robust and high-throughput
DISC'06 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Distributed Computing
Obstruction-Free algorithms can be practically wait-free
DISC'05 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Distributed Computing
Efficient transformations of obstruction-free algorithms into non-blocking algorithms
DISC'07 Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Distributed Computing
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We consider concurrent systems in which there is an unknown upper bound on memory access time. Such a model is inherently different from the asynchronous model, where no such bound exists, and also from timing-based models, where such a bound exists and is known a priori. The appeal of our model lies in the fact that while it abstracts from implementation details, it is a better approximation of real concurrent systems than the asynchronous model. Furthermore, it is stronger than the asynchronous model, enabling us to design algorithms for problems that are unsolvable in the asynchronous model.Two basic synchronization problems, consensus and mutual exclusion, are investigated in a shared-memory environment that supports atomic read/write registers. We show that $\Theta(\Delta\frac{\log \Delta}{\log\log \Delta})$ is an upper and lower bound on the time complexity of consensus, where $\Delta$ is the (unknown) upper bound on memory access time. For the mutual exclusion problem, we design an efficient algorithm that takes advantage of the fact that some upper bound on memory access time exists. The solutions for both problems are even more efficient in the absence of contention, in which case their time complexity is a constant.