Counting Networks and Multi-Processor Coordination

d Abstract) James Aspnes Maurice Herlihyy Nir Shavitz Digital Equipment Corporation Cambridge Research Lab CRL 90/11 September 18, 1991 Many fundamental multi-processor coordination problems can be expressed as counting problems: processes must cooperate to assign successive values from a given range, such as addresses in memoryor destinations on an interconnection network. Conventional solutions to these problems perform poorly because of synchronization bottlenecks and high memory contention. Motivated by observations on the behavior of sorting networks, we o er a completely new approach to solving such problems. We introduce a new class of networks called counting networks, i.e., networks that can be used to count. We give a counting network construction of depth log2 n using nlog2 n \gates," avoiding the sequential bottlenecks inherent to former solutions, and having a provably lower contention factor on its gates. Finally, to show that counting networks are not merely mathem...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1991
• Where: STOC
• Authors: James Aspnes, Maurice Herlihy, Nir Shavit
• Keywords: Algorithms, Counting Networks, Counting Problems, Digital Equipment Corporation, STOC 1991