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Scalable room synchronizations. (English) Zbl 1095.68028
Summary: This paper presents a scalable solution to the group mutual exclusion problem, with applications to linearizable stacks and queues, and related problems. Our solution allows entry and exit from the mutually exclusive regions in $$O(t_r + \tau)$$ time, where $$t_r$$ is the maximum time spent in a critical region by a user, and $$\tau$$ is the maximum time taken by any instruction, including a fetch-and-add instruction. This bound holds regardless of the number of users. We describe how stacks and queues can be implemented using two regions, one for pushing (enqueueing) and one for popping (dequeueing). These implementations are particularly simple, are linearizable, and support access in time proportional to a fetch-and-add operation. In addition, we present experimental results comparing room synchronizations with the Keane-Moir algorithm for group mutual exclusion.
##### MSC:
 68P05 Data structures 68Q10 Modes of computation (nondeterministic, parallel, interactive, probabilistic, etc.) 68Q85 Models and methods for concurrent and distributed computing (process algebras, bisimulation, transition nets, etc.)
##### Keywords:
enqueueing; dequeueing
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