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We prove a lower bound of Omega(log n/log log n) for the remote memory reference (RMR) complexity of abortable test-and-set (leader election) in the cache-coherent (CC) and the distributed shared memory (DSM) model. This separates the complexities of abortable and non-abortable test-and-set, as the latter has constant RMR complexity [Wojciech Golab et al., 2010]. Golab, Hendler, Hadzilacos and Woelfel [Wojciech M. Golab et al., 2012] showed that compare-and-swap can be implemented from registers and test-and-set objects with constant RMR complexity. We observe that a small modification to that implementation is abortable, provided that the used test-and-set objects are atomic (or abortable). As a consequence, using existing efficient randomized wait-free implementations of test-and-set [George Giakkoupis and Philipp Woelfel, 2012], we obtain randomized abortable compare-and-swap objects with almost constant (O(log^* n)) RMR complexity.
@InProceedings{eghbali_et_al:LIPIcs.DISC.2018.21,
author = {Eghbali, Aryaz and Woelfel, Philipp},
title = {{An Almost Tight RMR Lower Bound for Abortable Test-And-Set}},
booktitle = {32nd International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2018)},
pages = {21:1--21:19},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-092-7},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2018},
volume = {121},
editor = {Schmid, Ulrich and Widder, Josef},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2018.21},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-98103},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2018.21},
annote = {Keywords: Abortability, Test-And-Set, Leader Election, Compare-and-Swap, RMR Complexity, Lower Bound}
}