Abstract

A wait-free implementation of a concurrent data object is one that guarantees that any process can complete any operation in a finite number of steps, regardless of the execution speeds of the other processes. The problem of constructing a wait-free implementation of one data object from another lies at the heart of much recent work in concurrent algorithms, concurrent data structures, and multiprocessor architectures. In the first part of this paper, we introduce a simple and general technique, based on reduction to a consensus protocol, for proving statements of the form "there is no wait-free implementation of X by Y ." We derive a hierarchy of objects such that no object at one level has a wait-free implementation in terms of objects at lower levels. In particular, we show that atomic read/write registers, which have been the focus of much recent attention, are at the bottom of the hierarchy: they cannot be used to construct wait-free implementations of many simple and familiar da...

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