On the nature of progress
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Shavit_On the nature of progress.pdf
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Author(s)
Herlihy, Maurice
Shavit, Nir N.
Date Issued
December 2011
Journal
Principles of Distributed Systems
Publisher
Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
Citation
Herlihy, Maurice, and Nir Shavit. “On the Nature of Progress.” Principles of Distributed Systems. Ed. Antonio Fernàndez Anta, Giuseppe Lipari, & Matthieu Roy. LNCS Vol. 7109. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. 313–328. Web. 11 Oct. 2012.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We identify a simple relationship that unifies seemingly unrelated progress conditions ranging from the deadlock-free and starvation-free properties common to lock-based systems, to non-blocking conditions such as obstruction-freedom, lock-freedom, and wait-freedom.
Properties can be classified along two dimensions based on the demands they make on the operating system scheduler. A gap in the classification reveals a new non-blocking progress condition, weaker than obstruction-freedom, which we call clash-freedom.
The classification provides an intuitively-appealing explanation why programmers continue to devise data structures that mix both blocking and non-blocking progress conditions. It also explains why the wait-free property is a natural basis for the consensus hierarchy: a theory of shared-memory computation requires an independent progress condition, not one that makes demands of the operating system scheduler.
Description
15th International Conference, OPODIS 2011, Toulouse, France, December 13-16, 2011. Proceedings
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25873-2_22
