Collective asynchronous reading with polylogarithmic worst-case overhead

The Collect problem for an asynchronous shared-memory system has the objective for the processors to learn all values of a collection of shared registers, while minimizing the total number of write operations. First abstracted by Saks, Shavit, and Woll [37], Collect is among the standard problems in distributed computing, The model consists of n asynchronous processes, each with a single-writer multi-reader register of a polynomial capacity. The best previously known deterministic solution performs O(n3/2 log n) reads and writes, and it is due to Ajtai, Aspnes, Dwork, and Waarts [3]. This paper presents a new deterministic algorithm that performs O(n log7 n) read/write operations, thus substantially improving the best previous upper bound. Using an approach based on epidemic rumor-spreading, the novelty of the new algorithm is in using a family of expander graphs and ensuring that each of the successive groups of processes collect and propagate suf?ciently many rumors to the next grou...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: STOC
• Authors: Bogdan S. Chlebus, Dariusz R. Kowalski, Alexander A. Shvartsman
• Keywords: Algorithms, Computer Science, Deterministic Solution Performs, Repeatable Collect Problem, STOC 2004