A fast distributed modular algorithm for resource allocation

Abstract

This paper concerns resource allocation in distributed message passing systems, i.e., the scheduling of accesses to system resources shared among many concurrent processes. Three different kinds of resource allocation problems with varying degrees of generality are considered: the dining philosophers problem, the drinking philosophers problem and the dynamic resource allocation problem. We present an efficient modular resource allocation algorithm that uses any arbitrary resource allocation algorithm as a subroutine. It improves the performance of the subroutine by letting each process wait only for its currently conflicting processes, and therefore, allows more concurrency. For appropriate choices of the subroutine, we obtain the fastest known resource allocation algorithms in terms of the worst case response time. Simulation studies were conducted which also indicate that our algorithms perform faster and require a smaller number of messages than other previously known algorithms on average, especially when resource contention among processes is high and the average time that a process remains in the critical region is large.