Concurrent Timestamping Made Simple

Concurrent Time-stamp Systems (ctss) allow processes to temporally order concurrent events in an asynchronous shared memorysystem, a powerful tool for concurrency control, serving as the basis for solutions to coordination problems such as mutual exclusion, `-exclusion, randomized consensus, and multi-writer multi-reader atomic registers. Solutions to these problems all use an \unbounded number" based concurrent time-stamp system (uctss), a construction which is as simple to use as it is to understand. A bounded \black-box" replacement of uctss would imply equally simple bounded solutions to most of these extensively researched problems. Unfortunately, while all know applications use uctss, all existing solution algorithms are only proven to implement the Dolev-Shavit ctss axioms, which have been widely criticized as \hard-to-use." While it is easy to show that a uctss implements the ctss axioms, there is no proof that a system meeting the ctss axioms implements uctss. ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1992
• Where: ISTCS
• Authors: Rainer Gawlick, Nancy A. Lynch, Nir Shavit
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Ctss Axioms, Dolev-Shavit Ctss, Dolev-Shavit Ctss Axioms, ISTCS 1992