TY - GEN
T1 - Brief Announcement: Oh-RAM! One and a Half Round Read/Write Atomic Memory.
T2 - 35th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2016
AU - Hadjistasi, Theophanis
AU - Nicolaou, Nicolas
AU - Schwarzmann, Alexander A.
N1 - DBLP License: DBLP's bibliographic metadata records provided through http://dblp.org/ are distributed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Although the bibliographic metadata records are provided consistent with CC0 1.0 Dedication, the content described by the metadata records is not. Content may be subject to copyright, rights of privacy, rights of publicity and other restrictions.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Emulating atomic read/write shared objects in a message- passing system is a fundamental problem in distributed computing. Considering that network communication is the most expensive resource, efficiency is measured first of all in terms of the communication needed to implement read and write operations. It is well known that two commu- nication round-trip phases involving in total four message exchanges are sufficient to implemented atomic operations. In this work we present a comprehensive treatment of the question of when and how it is possible to implement atomic memory where read and write operations complete in three message exchanges, i.e., we aim for One and half Round Atomic Memory, hence the name Oh-RAM! We present al- gorithms that allow operations to complete in three commu- nication exchanges without imposing any constraints on the number of readers and writers. We present an implementa- tion for the single-writer/multiple-reader (SWMR) setting, where reads complete in three communication exchanges and writes complete in two exchanges. Then we pose the question of whether it is possible to implement multiple- writer/multiple-reader (MWMR) memory where operations complete in at most three communication exchanges. We answer this question in the negative by showing that an atomic memory implementation is impossible if both read and write operations take three communication exchanges, even when assuming two writers, two readers, and a single replica server failure. Motivated by this impossibility re- sult, we provide a MWMR atomic memory implementation where reads involve three and writes involve four communi- cation exchanges. In light of our impossibility result these algorithms are optimal in terms of the number of commu- nication exchanges.
AB - Emulating atomic read/write shared objects in a message- passing system is a fundamental problem in distributed computing. Considering that network communication is the most expensive resource, efficiency is measured first of all in terms of the communication needed to implement read and write operations. It is well known that two commu- nication round-trip phases involving in total four message exchanges are sufficient to implemented atomic operations. In this work we present a comprehensive treatment of the question of when and how it is possible to implement atomic memory where read and write operations complete in three message exchanges, i.e., we aim for One and half Round Atomic Memory, hence the name Oh-RAM! We present al- gorithms that allow operations to complete in three commu- nication exchanges without imposing any constraints on the number of readers and writers. We present an implementa- tion for the single-writer/multiple-reader (SWMR) setting, where reads complete in three communication exchanges and writes complete in two exchanges. Then we pose the question of whether it is possible to implement multiple- writer/multiple-reader (MWMR) memory where operations complete in at most three communication exchanges. We answer this question in the negative by showing that an atomic memory implementation is impossible if both read and write operations take three communication exchanges, even when assuming two writers, two readers, and a single replica server failure. Motivated by this impossibility re- sult, we provide a MWMR atomic memory implementation where reads involve three and writes involve four communi- cation exchanges. In light of our impossibility result these algorithms are optimal in terms of the number of commu- nication exchanges.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84984690323&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1145/2933057.2933073
DO - 10.1145/2933057.2933073
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84984690323
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
SP - 353
EP - 355
BT - PODC 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 25 July 2016 through 28 July 2016
ER -