Abstract

We establish trade-offs between time complexity and write- and access-contention for solutions to the mutual exclusion problem. The write-contention (access-contention) of a concurrent program is the number of processes that may be simultaneously enabled to write (access by reading and/or writing) the same shared variable. Our notion of time complexity distinguishes between local and remote accesses of shared memory. We show that, for any N-process mutual exclusion algorithm, if write-contention is w, and if at most v remote variables can be accessed by a single atomic operation, then there exists an execution involving only one process in which that process executes\Omega\Gammaecu vw N) remote operations for entry into its critical section. We further show that, among these operations,\Omega\Gamma p log vw N) distinct remote variables are accessed. For algorithms with access-contention c, we show that the latter bound can be improved to \Omega\Gamma/51 vc N ). The last two of thes...

Citations