Technical Report: Asymmetric Mutual Exclusion for RDMA

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel asymmetric mutual exclusion method tailored for RDMA-enabled distributed systems, reducing remote RDMA operations while ensuring fairness and starvation-freedom.

Contribution

It presents a new mutual exclusion approach that minimizes remote RDMA operations and guarantees fairness and starvation-freedom in distributed systems.

Findings

Reduces the number of RDMA operations needed remotely.

Guarantees starvation-freedom and fairness.

Enables local processes to avoid RDMA operations altogether.

Abstract

Coordinating concurrent access to a shared resource using mutual exclusion is a fundamental problem in computation. In this paper, we present a novel approach to mutual exclusion designed specifically for distributed systems leveraging a popular network communication technology, remote direct memory access (RDMA). Our approach enables local processes to avoid using RDMA operations entirely, limits the number of RDMA operations required by remote processes, and guarantees both starvation-freedom and fairness.