RMR-efficient implementations of comparison primitives using read and write operations

Abstract

We consider asynchronous multiprocessors where processes communicate only by reading or writing shared memory. We show how to implement consensus, compare-and-swap and other comparison primitives, as well as load-linked/store-conditional (LL/SC) using only a constant number of remote memory references (RMRs), in both the cache-coherent and the distributed-shared-memory models of such multiprocessors. Our implementations are blocking, rather than wait-free: they ensure progress provided all processes that invoke the implemented primitive are live. Our results imply that any algorithm using read and write operations, and either comparison primitives or LL/SC, can be simulated by an algorithm that uses read and write operations only, with at most a constant-factor increase in RMR complexity.