Coordination of Parallel Processes in the Actor Model of Computation

Abstract

Two algorithms for the mutual exclusion problem are described and proven to operate correctly. The algorithms are unique in that they use very simple synchronization primitives yet are fair and retain their fairness even if the number of parallel processes in the computer system increases unboundedly over time. One of the algorithms uses simple cells of read/write storage as the primitive; the algorithm is similar to the classic algorithms for this problem proposed by Dijkstra and Knuth, but is generalized to handle an arbitrary number of processes.