On the implementation of concurrent objects
Dependable and Historic Computing
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A concurrent object is an object that can be concurrently accessed by several processes. A wait-free implementation of an object is such that any operation issued by a non-faulty process terminates in a finite number of its own steps, whatever the behavior of the other processes (that can be very slow or even have crashed). An object type is universal if objects of that type, together with atomic registers, allows implementing any concurrent object defined by a sequential specification. A universal construction is a wait-free algorithm, based only on atomic registers and universal objects, that, given any sequential object type T, provides the processes with a wait-free concurrent object of the type T. In a famous paper (titled "Wait-free synchronization") Herlihy has shown that consensus objects are universal, and has presented a consensus-based universal construction.