Bounded Concurrent Timestamp Systems Using Vector Clocks

Shared registers are basic objects used as communication mediums in asynchronous concurrent computation. A concurrent timestamp system is a higher typed communication object, and has been shown to be a powerful tool to solve many concurrency control problems. It has turned out to be possible to construct such higher typed objects from primitive lower typed ones. The next step is to find efficient constructions. We propose a very efficient wait-free construction of bounded concurrent timestamp systems from 1-writer multireader registers. This finalizes, corrects, and extends, a preliminary bounded multiwriter construction proposed by the second author in 1986. That work partially initiated the current interest in wait-free concurrent objects, and introduced a notion of discrete vector clocks in distributed algorithms.Comment: LaTeX source, 35 pages; To apper in: J. Assoc. Comp. Mac

How hard is it to take a snapshot

Abstract. The snapshot object is an important and well-studied primitive in distributed computing. This paper will present some implementations of snapshots from registers, in both asycnhronous and synchronous systems, and discuss known lower bounds on the time and space complexity of this problem

Concurrent Timestamping Made Simple

Concurrent Timestamp Systems (CTSS) allow processes to temporally order concurrent events in an asynchronous shared memory system. Bounded memory constructions of a CTSS are extremely powerful tools for concurrency control, and are the basis for solutions to many coordination problems including mutual exclusion, randomized consensus, and multiwriter multireader atomic registers