The weakest failure detectors to boost obstruction-freedom

This paper determines necessary and sufficient conditions to implement wait-free and non-blocking contention managers in a shared memory system. The necessary conditions hold even when universal objects (like compare-and-swap) or random oracles are available, whereas the sufficient ones assume only registers. We show that failure detector P is the weakest to convert any obstruction-free algorithm into a wait-free one, and , a new failure detector which we introduce in this paper, and which is strictly weaker than P but strictly stronger than , is the weakest to convert any obstruction-free algorithm into a non-blocking one.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: DC
• Authors: Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka, Petr Kouznetsov
• Keywords: DC 2001, DC 2008, Failure Detector, Non-blocking Contention Managers, Obstruction-free Algorithm