Nontrivial and Universal Helping for Wait-Free Queues and Stacks

Attiya, Hagit; Castaneda, Armando; Hendler, Danny

doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2015.31

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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2015.31
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-66201

Author Details

Hagit Attiya

Armando Castaneda

Danny Hendler

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Hagit Attiya, Armando Castaneda, and Danny Hendler. Nontrivial and Universal Helping for Wait-Free Queues and Stacks. In 19th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2015). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 46, pp. 31:1-31:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2016)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2015.31

Abstract

This paper studies two approaches to formalize helping in wait-free implementations of shared objects. The first approach is based on operation valency, and it allows us to make the important distinction between trivial and nontrivial helping. We show that a wait-free implementation of a queue from common2 objects (e.g., Test&Set) requires nontrivial helping. In contrast, there is a wait-free implementation of a stack from Common2 objects with only trivial helping. This separation might shed light on the difficulty of implementing a queue from Common2 objects. The other approach formalizes the helping mechanism employed by Herlihy's universal wait-free construction and is based on having an operation by one process restrict the possible linearizations of operations by other processes. We show that objects possessing such universal helping can be used to solve consensus.

Keywords

helping
wait-free
nonblocking
queues
stacks
common2

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References

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