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Fast Randomized Test-and-Set and Renaming

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Distributed Computing (DISC 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6343))

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Abstract

Most people believe that renaming is easy: simply choose a name at random; if more than one process selects the same name, then try again. We highlight the issues that occur when trying to implement such a scheme and shed new light on the read-write complexity of randomized renaming in an asynchronous environment. At the heart of our new perspective stands an adaptive implementation of a randomized test-and-set object, that has poly-logarithmic step complexity per operation, with high probability. Interestingly, our implementation is anonymous, as it does not require process identifiers. Based on this implementation, we present two new randomized renaming algorithms. The first ensures a tight namespace of n names using O( n log4 n) total steps, with high probability. This significantly improves on the complexity of the best previously known namespace-optimal algorithms. The second algorithm achieves a namespace of size k (1 + ε) using O( k log4 k / log2 (1 + ε) ) total steps, both with high probability, where k is the total contention in the execution. It is the first adaptive randomized renaming algorithm, and it improves on existing deterministic solutions by providing a smaller namespace, and by lowering step complexity.

The work of Dan Alistarh is supported by the Swiss NCCR MICS project. The work of Hagit Attiya is supported in part by the Israel Science Foundation (grant number 953/06).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Dan Alistarh, Hagit Attiya, Andrei Giurgiu & Rachid Guerraoui

  2. Technion, Haifa, Israel

    Hagit Attiya

  3. National University of, Singapore

    Seth Gilbert

Authors
  1. Dan Alistarh
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  2. Hagit Attiya
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  3. Seth Gilbert
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  4. Andrei Giurgiu
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  5. Rachid Guerraoui
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 02139-4307, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Nancy A. Lynch

  2. Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut, 371 Fairfield Way, Unit 2155, 06269, Storrs, CT, USA

    Alexander A. Shvartsman

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Alistarh, D., Attiya, H., Gilbert, S., Giurgiu, A., Guerraoui, R. (2010). Fast Randomized Test-and-Set and Renaming. In: Lynch, N.A., Shvartsman, A.A. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6343. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15763-9_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15763-9_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15762-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15763-9

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