On the Importance of Registers for Computability
Name
Shavit_On the importance.pdf
Size
333.25 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5ba94767268388598e873f9a79419079
Author(s)
Gelashvili, Rati
Ghaffari, Mohsen
Li, Jerry Zheng
Shavit, Nir N.
Date Issued
2014
Journal
Principles of Distributed Systems
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Citation
Gelashvili, Rati, Mohsen Ghaffari, Jerry Li, and Nir Shavit. “On the Importance of Registers for Computability.” Principles of Distributed Systems (2014): 171–185.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
All consensus hierarchies in the literature assume that we have, in addition to copies of a given object, an unbounded number of registers. But why do we really need these registers?
This paper considers what would happen if one attempts to solve consensus using various objects but without any registers. We show that under a reasonable assumption, objects like queues and stacks cannot emulate the missing registers. We also show that, perhaps surprisingly, initialization, shown to have no computational consequences when registers are readily available, is crucial in determining the synchronization power of objects when no registers are allowed. Finally, we show that without registers, the number of available objects affects the level of consensus that can be solved.
Our work thus raises the question of whether consensus hierarchies which assume an unbounded number of registers truly capture synchronization power, and begins a line of research aimed at better understanding the interaction between read-write memory and the powerful synchronization operations available on modern architectures.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14472-6_12
