In a shared-memory distributed system, n independent asynchronous processes communicate by reading and writing to shared memory. An algorithm is adaptive (to total contention) if its step complexity depends only on the actual number, k, of active processes in the execution; this number is unknown in advance and may change in different executions of the algorithm. Adaptive algorithms are inherently wait-free, providing fault-tolerance in the presence of an arbitrary number of crash failures and different processes' speed. A wait-free adaptive collect algorithm with O(k) step complexity is presented, together with its applications in wait-free adaptive algorithms for atomic snapshots, immediate snapshots and renaming. Keywords: contention-sensitive complexity, wait-free algorithms, asynchronous sharedmemory systems, read/write registers, atomic snapshots, immediate atomic snapshots, renaming. Work supported by the fund for the promotion of research in the Technion. y Department of Computer Science, The Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel. hagit@cs.technion.ac.il. z Department of Computer Science, The Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel. leonf@cs.technion.ac.il. x Computer Science Department, UCLA. eli@cs.ucla.edu. 1

This paper addresses the properties and design of long-lived adaptive algorithms in the read/write shared memory model. In particular we present adaptive and long-lived algorithms that adapt to the point contention of an operation while using only a bounded amount of memory. We believe the techniques and building blocks developed here to be of further use in the design of adaptive and long-lived algorithms. We use the renaming problem as a test-case to demonstrate the new techniques and properties. Three new implementations of adaptive, wait-free, and long-lived renaming in the read/write shared memory model are presented. Unlike previous algorithms [1] the three algorithms require a bounded number of registers and adapt to the point contention of an operation. The two previous algorithms presented in [1] either adapt to the point contention or use a bounded size memory...

this paper we were able to define and implement a variant of the Moir-Anderson splitter that does not have all the properties that their splitter has but on the other hand, has an adaptive and long-lived implementation. Furthermore, we use this splitter as a building block in constructions other than a grid (for example a row of splitters or a tree of splitters) and in this way implement diverse applications such as mutual exclusion and optimal name space renaming

Efficient locking synchronization primitives are essential for achieving high performance in fine-grain, shared-memory parallel programs. One function of locking primitives is to enable exclusive access to shared data and critical sections of code. In this dissertation, I make the following six contributions. (1) I propose a framework, the synchronization period, in which to reason about the inefficiencies of locking primitives. (2) I identify four previously proposed locking mechanisms (local spinning, queue-based locking, collocation, and synchronous prefetch) and uses them to classify existing locking primitives according to which of these mechanisms they incorporate. (3) With detailed simulations, I show the extent to which these four mechanisms can improve the performance of sharedmemory programs. I evaluate the space of these mechanisms using sixteen synchronization constructs, which are formed from six base types of locks (test&set, test&test&set, MCS, LH, M, and QOLB). I show t...

The distributed setting of this paper is an asynchronous system consisting of n processes prone to crashes and a number of shared read-write registers. We consider problems regarding assigning integer values to processes in an exclusive way, in the sense that no integer is assigned to two distinct processes. In the problem of renaming, any k ≤ n processes, that hold original names from a range [N] = {1,..., N}, contend to acquire unique integers as new names in a smaller range [M] using some r shared registers. When k and N are known, our wait-free solution operates in O(log k(log N + log k log log N)) local steps, for M = O(k), and with r = O(k log N) auxiliary shared registers. Processes obtain new k names by exploring their neighbors in bipartite graphs of suitable expansion properties, with nodes representing names and processes competing for the name of each visited node.} local steps are required in the worst case to wait-free solve renaming, when k and N are known and r and M are given constraints. We give a fully adaptive solution, with neither k nor N known, having M = 8k − lg k − 1 as a bound on the range of new names, operating in O(k) steps and using O(n 2) registers. We apply renaming algorithms to obtain solutions to the Store&Collect problem. When both k and N are known, then storing can be performed in O(log k(log N + log k log log N)) steps and collecting in O(k) steps, for r = O(k log(N/k)) registers. We consider the problem Unbounded-Naming in which processes repeatedly require new names, while no name can be reused once assigned, so that infinitely many integers need to be exclusively assigned as names. For no fixed integer i can one guarantee in a wait-free manner that i is eventually assigned to be a name, so some integers may never be used; the upper bound on the number of such unused integers is used as a measure of quality of a solution. We show that Unbounded-Naming is solvable in a non-blocking way with at most n −1 integers never assigned as names, which is best possible, and in a wait-free manner with at most n(n − 1) values never assigned as names.

Abstract. Most people believe that renaming is easy: simply choose a name at random; if more than one process selects the same name, then try again. We highlight the issues that occur when trying to implement such a scheme and shed new light on the read-write complexity of randomized renaming in an asynchronous environment. At the heart of our new perspective stands an adaptive implementation of a randomized test-and-set object, that has poly-logarithmic step complexity per operation, with high probability. Interestingly, our implementation is anonymous, as it does not require process identifiers. Based on this implementation, we present two new randomized renaming algorithms. The first ensures a tight namespace of n names using O(n log 4 n) total steps, with high probability. This significantly improves on the complexity of the best previously known namespace-optimal algorithms. The second algorithm achieves a namespace of size k(1 + ɛ) using O(k log 4 k / log 2 (1 + ɛ)) total steps, both with high probability, where k is the total contention in the execution. It is the first adaptive randomized renaming algorithm, and it improves on existing deterministic solutions by providing a smaller namespace, and by lowering step complexity. 1

We study the complexity of renaming, a fundamental problem in distributed computing in which a set of processes need to pick distinct names from a given namespace. We prove an individual lower bound of Ω(k) process steps for deterministic renaming into any namespace of size sub-exponential in k, where k is the number of participants. This bound is tight: it draws an exponential separation between deterministic and randomized solutions, and implies new tight bounds for deterministic fetch-and-increment registers, queues and stacks. The proof of the bound is interesting in its own right, for it relies on the first reduction from renaming to another fundamental problem in distributed computing: mutual exclusion. We complement our individual bound with a global lower bound of Ω(k log(k/c)) on the total step complexity of renaming into a namespace of size ck, for any c ≥ 1. This applies to randomized algorithms against a strong adversary, and helps derive new global lower bounds for randomized approximate counter and fetch-and-increment implementations, all tight within logarithmic factors. 1

this paper. Motivated by their first work Moir and Anderson developed renaming algorithms, in the read/write model, when such a bound on the maximum number of processes is known in advance. This led to a sequence of works on the renaming problem in this model [MA95, MG96, BGHM95] that lead to a long-lived (2K \Gamma 1)-renaming algorithm with O(K ) step complexity and O(K space complexity [Moi98]. These works employed various variants of the splitter building block which is a descendant of Lamport's adaptive mutual exclusion algorithm, however the last one [Moi98] depends on an additional work which is the first long-lived renaming algorithm by Burns and Peterson [BP89]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The generous financial help of Technion is gratefully acknowledged First of all, I thank Prof. Hagit Attiya for her excellent guidance, for knowledge, experience and time that she has given me throughout all stages of the work. Thanks to Prof. Yehuda Afek, Dr. Dan Touitou and Dr. Gideon Stupp for their friendship, help and support, particularly during the PODC98 conference. I would like to thank Prof. Eli Gafni for his insight and for very helpful discussions. I owe a depth of gratitude to Rabbi Yosef Brook who encouraged me to continue studies towards Ph.D. degree, and to Rabbi Nachum Diamont for his wise advise and help.

Two implementations of an adaptive, wait-free, and long-lived renaming task in the read/write shared memory model are presented. Implementations of longlived and adaptive objects were previously known only in the much stronger model of load-linked and store-conditional (i.e., read-modify-write) shared memory. In read/write shared-memory only one-shot adaptive objects are known. Presented here are two algorithms that assign a new unique id in the range 1, ..., O(k²) to any process whose initial unique name is taken from a set of size N , for an arbitrary N and where k is the number of processors that actually take steps or hold a name while the new name is being acquired. The step complexity of acquiring a new name is respectively O(k²) and O(k² log k), while the step complexity of releasing a name is 1. The main differences between the two algorithms are in the prec...