The Disclosure Power of Shared Objects

Shared objects are the means by which processes gather and exchange information about the state of a distributed system. Objects that disclose more information about the system—and thus provide a more centralized view—are therefore more desirable. In this paper, we propose the schedule reconstruction (SR) problem as a new metric for the disclosure power of shared memory objects. In schedule reconstruction, processes take steps which are interleaved to form a schedule; each process needs to be able to reconstruct the schedule up to its last step. We show that objects can be ranked in a hierarchy according to their ability to solve SR. In this hierarchy, stronger objects can implement weaker objects via a SR-based universal construction. We identify a connection between SR and consensus and prove that SR is at least as hard as consensus. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that objects that are powerful in solving consensus—such as compare-and-swap—are not always powerful in their ability to solve SR

Laziness Pays! Using Lazy Synchronization Mechanisms to Improve Non-Blocking Constructions

We present a simple and efficient wait-free implementation of Lazy Large Load-Linked/Store-Conditional (Lazy-LL/SC), which can be used to atomically modify a dynamically-determined set of shared variables in a lock-free manner. The semantics of Lazy-LL/SC is weaker than that of similar objects used by us previously to design lock-free and wait-free constructions, and as a result can be implemented more efficiently. However, we show that Lazy-LL/SC is strong enough to be used in existing nonblocking universal constructions and to build new ones

Efficient Wait-Free Algorithms for Implementing LL/SC Objects

Over the past decade, a pair of instructions called load-linked (LL) and store-conditional (SC) have emerged as the most suitable synchronization instructions for the design of lock-free algorithms. However, current architectures do not support these instructions; instead, they support either CAS (e.g., UltraSPARC, Itanium, Pentium) or restricted versions of LL/SC (e.g., POWER4, MIPS, Alpha). Thus, there is a gap between what algorithm designers want (namely, LL/SC) and what multiprocessors actually support (namely, CAS or restricted LL/SC). To bridge this gap, this thesis presents a series of efficient, wait-free algorithms that implement LL/SC from CAS or restricted LL/SC

Efficient Passive Clustering and Gateways selection MANETs

Passive clustering does not employ control packets to collect topological information in ad hoc networks. In our proposal, we avoid making frequent changes in cluster architecture due to repeated election and re-election of cluster heads and gateways. Our primary objective has been to make Passive Clustering more practical by employing optimal number of gateways and reduce the number of rebroadcast packets