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Documents authored by Talmage, Edward


Document
Improved and Partially-Tight Lower Bounds for Message-Passing Implementations of Multiplicity Queues

Authors: Anh Tran and Edward Talmage

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 281, 37th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2023)


Abstract
A multiplicity queue is a concurrently-defined data type which relaxes the conditions of a linearizable FIFO queue to allow concurrent Dequeue instances to return the same value. It would seem that this should allow faster message-passing implementations, as processes should not need to wait as long to learn about concurrent operations at remote processes and previous work has shown that multiplicity queues are computationally less complex than the unrelaxed version. Intriguingly, other work has shown that there is, in fact, not much speedup possible versus an unrelaxed queue implementation. Seeking to understand this difference between intuition and real behavior, we improve the existing lower bound for uniform algorithms. We also give an upper bound for a special case to show that our bound is tight at that point. To achieve our lower bounds, we use extended shifting arguments, which are rarely used. We use these techniques in series of inductive indistinguishability proofs, extending our proofs beyond the usual limitations of traditional shifting arguments. This proof structure is an interesting contribution independently of the main result, as new lower bound proof techniques may have many uses in future work.

Cite as

Anh Tran and Edward Talmage. Improved and Partially-Tight Lower Bounds for Message-Passing Implementations of Multiplicity Queues. In 37th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 281, pp. 34:1-34:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)


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@InProceedings{tran_et_al:LIPIcs.DISC.2023.34,
  author =	{Tran, Anh and Talmage, Edward},
  title =	{{Improved and Partially-Tight Lower Bounds for Message-Passing Implementations of Multiplicity Queues}},
  booktitle =	{37th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2023)},
  pages =	{34:1--34:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-301-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{281},
  editor =	{Oshman, Rotem},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2023.34},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-191609},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2023.34},
  annote =	{Keywords: Distributed Data Structures, ADTs, Lower Bounds, Shifting Arguments, Multiplicity Queues}
}
Document
Fast and Space-Efficient Queues via Relaxation

Authors: Dempsey Wade and Edward Talmage

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 184, 24th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2020)


Abstract
Efficient message-passing implementations of shared data types are a vital component of practical distributed systems, enabling them to work on shared data in predictable ways, but there is a long history of results showing that many of the most useful types of access to shared data are necessarily slow. A variety of approaches attempt to circumvent these bounds, notably weakening consistency guarantees and relaxing the sequential specification of the provided data type. These trade behavioral guarantees for performance. We focus on relaxing the sequential specification of a first-in, first-out queue type, which has been shown to allow faster linearizable implementations than are possible for traditional FIFO queues without relaxation. The algorithms which showed these improvements in operation time tracked a complete execution history, storing complete object state at all n processes in the system, leading to n copies of every stored data element. In this paper, we consider the question of reducing the space complexity of linearizable implementations of shared data types, which provide intuitive behavior through strong consistency guarantees. We improve the existing algorithm for a relaxed queue, showing that it is possible to store only one copy of each element in a shared queue, while still having a low amortized time cost. This is one of several important steps towards making these data types practical in real world systems.

Cite as

Dempsey Wade and Edward Talmage. Fast and Space-Efficient Queues via Relaxation. In 24th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 184, pp. 14:1-14:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021)


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@InProceedings{wade_et_al:LIPIcs.OPODIS.2020.14,
  author =	{Wade, Dempsey and Talmage, Edward},
  title =	{{Fast and Space-Efficient Queues via Relaxation}},
  booktitle =	{24th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2020)},
  pages =	{14:1--14:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-176-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2021},
  volume =	{184},
  editor =	{Bramas, Quentin and Oshman, Rotem and Romano, Paolo},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2020.14},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-134994},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2020.14},
  annote =	{Keywords: Shared Data Structures, Message Passing, Relaxed Data Types, Space Complexity}
}
Document
Generic Proofs of Consensus Numbers for Abstract Data Types

Authors: Edward Talmage and Jennifer Welch

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 46, 19th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2015)


Abstract
The power of shared data types to solve consensus in asynchronous wait-free systems is a fundamental question in distributed computing, but is largely considered only for specific data types. We consider general classes of abstract shared data types, and classify types of operations on those data types by the knowledge about past operations that processes can extract from the state of the shared object. We prove upper and lower bounds on the number of processes which can use data types in these classes to solve consensus. Our results generalize the consensus numbers known for a wide variety of specific shared data types, such as compare-and-swap, augmented queues and stacks, registers, and cyclic queues. Further, since the classification is based directly on the semantics of operations, one can use the bounds we present to determine the consensus number of a new data type from its specification. We show that, using sets of operations which can detect the first change to the shared object state, or even one at a fixed distance from the beginning of the execution, any number of processes can solve consensus. However, if instead of one of the first changes, operations can only detect one of the most recent changes, then fewer processes can solve consensus. In general, if each operation can either change shared state or read it, but not both, then the number of processes which can solve consensus is limited by the number of consecutive recent operations which can be viewed by a single operation. Allowing operations that both change and read the shared state can allow consensus algorithms with more processes, but if the operations can only see one change a fixed number of operations in the past, we upper bound the number of processes which can solve consensus with a small constant.

Cite as

Edward Talmage and Jennifer Welch. Generic Proofs of Consensus Numbers for Abstract Data Types. In 19th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2015). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 46, pp. 32:1-32:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2016)


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@InProceedings{talmage_et_al:LIPIcs.OPODIS.2015.32,
  author =	{Talmage, Edward and Welch, Jennifer},
  title =	{{Generic Proofs of Consensus Numbers for Abstract Data Types}},
  booktitle =	{19th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2015)},
  pages =	{32:1--32:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-939897-98-9},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2016},
  volume =	{46},
  editor =	{Anceaume, Emmanuelle and Cachin, Christian and Potop-Butucaru, Maria},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2015.32},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-66217},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2015.32},
  annote =	{Keywords: Distributed Data Structures, Abstract Data Types, Consensus Numbers, Distributed Computing, Crash Failures}
}
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