Fast, long-lived renaming

Abstract

We consider wait-free solutions to the renaming problem for shared-memory multiprocessing systems [3, 5]. In the renaming problem, processes are required to choose new names in order to reduce the size of their name space. Previous solutions to the renaming problem have time complexity that is dependent on the size of the original name space, and allow processes to acquire names only once. In this paper, we present several new renaming algorithms. Most of our algorithms have time complexity that is independent of the size of the original name space, and some of our algorithms solve a new, more general version of the renaming problem called long-lived renaming. In long-lived renaming algorithms, processes may repeatedly acquire and release names.