TY - GEN
T1 - On the use of registers in achieving wait-free consensus
AU - Bazzi, Rida A.
AU - Neiger, Gil
AU - Peterson, Gary L.
N1 - Funding Information:
*This author was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants CCR-9106627 and CCR-9301454. Author’s address: College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0280. f T& author was supported in part by a scholarship Hariri Foundation. t ‘ThIs author was supported in part by the W. F. Kellogg Foundation under a grant to the Center for Scientific Applications of Mathematics at Spelman College. Author’s address: Computer and Information Science Program, Spelman College, 35o Spelman
PY - 1994/8/14
Y1 - 1994/8/14
N2 - The computational power of concurrent data types has been the focus of much recent research. Herlihy showed that such power may be measured by examining the type's ability to implement wait-free consensus. Jayanti argued that this "ability" could be measured in different ways, depending, for example, on whether or not read/write registers could be used in an implementation. He demonstrated the significance of this distinction by exhibiting a nondeterministic type whose ability to implement consensus was increased with the availability of registers. We show that registers cannot increase the computational power (to implement consensus) of any deterministic type or of any type that can implement 2-process consensus. These results significantly impact upon the study of the wait-free hierarchies of concurrent data types. In particular, the combination of these results with other recent works shows that Jayanti's hm hierarchy is robust for deterministic types.
AB - The computational power of concurrent data types has been the focus of much recent research. Herlihy showed that such power may be measured by examining the type's ability to implement wait-free consensus. Jayanti argued that this "ability" could be measured in different ways, depending, for example, on whether or not read/write registers could be used in an implementation. He demonstrated the significance of this distinction by exhibiting a nondeterministic type whose ability to implement consensus was increased with the availability of registers. We show that registers cannot increase the computational power (to implement consensus) of any deterministic type or of any type that can implement 2-process consensus. These results significantly impact upon the study of the wait-free hierarchies of concurrent data types. In particular, the combination of these results with other recent works shows that Jayanti's hm hierarchy is robust for deterministic types.
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U2 - 10.1145/197917.198124
DO - 10.1145/197917.198124
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84955609437
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
SP - 354
EP - 362
BT - Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 1994
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 13th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 1994
Y2 - 14 August 1994 through 17 August 1994
ER -