Long lived adaptive splitter and applications

• Published in: Distributed computing Vol. 15; no. 2; pp. 67 - 86
• Main Authors: Afek, Yehuda, Stupp, Gideon, Touitou, Dan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Heidelberg Springer Nature B.V 01-04-2002
• ISSN: 0178-2770; 1432-0452
• DOI: 10.1007/s004460100060

Long-lived and adaptive implementations of mutual exclusion and renaming in the read/write shared memory model are presented. An implementation of a task is adaptive if the step complexity of any operation in the implementation is a function of the number of processes that take steps concurrently with the operation. The renaming algorithm assigns a new unique id in the range 1, times times times , 4k super(2) to any process whose initial unique name is taken from a set of size N, for an arbitrary N and where k is the number of processes that actually take steps or hold a name while the new name is being acquired. The step complexity of acquiring a new name is O(k super(2)), while the step complexity of releasing a name is 1. The space complexity of the algorithm is O(Nn super(2)) where n is an upper bound on the number of processes that may be active at the same time (acquiring or holding new names), which could be N in the worst case. Both the system response time and the worst case number of operations per process in the presented mutual-exclusion algorithm are adaptive. Both algorithms rely on the basic building block of a long-lived and adaptive splitter. While the adaptive-splitter satisfies a slightly different set of properties than the Moir-Anderson splitter [MA95], it is adaptive and long-lived. In addition, the new splitter properties enable the construction of a non-blocking long-lived (2k - 1)-renaming algorithm (which is optimal in the size of the new name space). We believe that the mechanisms introduced in our splitter implementation are interesting on their own, and might be used in other adaptive and long-lived constructions.