Time-Efficient Read/Write Register in Crash-prone Asynchronous Message-Passing Systems

Achour Mostefaoui (1) , Michel Raynal (2)

1 LINA - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Nantes Atlantique
2 ASAP - As Scalable As Possible: foundations of large scale dynamic distributed systems

The atomic register is certainly the most basic object of computing science. Its implementation on top of an n-process asynchronous message-passing system has received a lot of attention. It has been shown that t < n/2 (where t is the maximal number of processes that may crash) is a necessary and sufficient requirement to build an atomic register on top of a crash-prone asynchronous message-passing system. Considering such a context, this paper visits the notion of a fast implementation of an atomic register, and presents a new time-efficient asynchronous algorithm. Its time-efficiency is measured according to two different underlying synchrony assumptions. Whatever this assumption, a write operation always costs a round-trip delay, while a read operation costs always a round-trip delay in favorable circumstances (intuitively, when it is not concurrent with a write). When designing this algorithm, the design spirit was to be as close as possible to the one of the famous ABD algorithm (proposed by Attiya, Bar-Noy, and Dolev).

Mots clés: Fast operation; Atomic read/write register; Concurrency; Asynchronous message-passing system; Process crash failure; Synchronous behavior; Time-efficient operation

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Achour Mostefaoui, Michel Raynal. Time-Efficient Read/Write Register in Crash-prone Asynchronous Message-Passing Systems. [Research Report] IRISA. 2016, pp.14. ⟨hal-01256067⟩