Bounded Concurrent Timestamp Systems Using Vector Clocks

TL;DR

This paper presents an efficient wait-free construction of bounded concurrent timestamp systems using vector clocks, advancing the design of concurrent communication objects from primitive registers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, efficient wait-free method for constructing bounded concurrent timestamp systems from 1-writer multireader registers, completing and extending previous work.

Findings

Provides a wait-free construction method

Uses vector clocks for concurrency control

Extends prior multiwriter constructions

Abstract

Shared registers are basic objects used as communication mediums in asynchronous concurrent computation. A concurrent timestamp system is a higher typed communication object, and has been shown to be a powerful tool to solve many concurrency control problems. It has turned out to be possible to construct such higher typed objects from primitive lower typed ones. The next step is to find efficient constructions. We propose a very efficient wait-free construction of bounded concurrent timestamp systems from 1-writer multireader registers. This finalizes, corrects, and extends, a preliminary bounded multiwriter construction proposed by the second author in 1986. That work partially initiated the current interest in wait-free concurrent objects, and introduced a notion of discrete vector clocks in distributed algorithms.