Uniform Solvability with a Finite Number of MWMR Registers

Abstract

This paper introduces a new interesting research question concerning tasks. The weak-test-and-set task has a uniform solution that requires only two Multi-Writer Multi-Reader (MWMR) registers. Recently it was shown that if we take the long-lived version and require a step complexity that is adaptive to interval contention then, like mutual exclusion, no solution with finitely many MWMR registers is possible. Here we show that there are simple tasks which provably cannot be solved uniformly with finitely many MWMR registers. This opens up the research question of when a task is uniformly solvable using only finitely many MWMR registers.