Composite registers

Abstract

We introduce a shared data object, called a composite register, that generalizes the notion of an atomic register. A composite register is an array-like shared data object that is partitioned into a number of components. An operation of a composite register either writes a value to a single component or reads the values of all components. A composite register reduces to an ordinary atomic register when there is only one component. In this paper, we show that multi-reader, single-writer atomic registers can be used to implement a composite register in which there is only one writer per component. In a related paper, we show how to use the composite register construction of this paper to implement a composite register with multiple writers per component. These two constructions show that it is possible to implement a shared memory that can be read in its entirety in a single snapshot operation, without using mutual exclusion.