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Wait-Free Dining Under Eventual Weak Exclusion
Research Area: Distributed Computing Year: 2008
Type of Publication: In Proceedings Keywords: Dining Philosophers , Failure Detectors, Wait-Freedom
Authors:  
Volume: 4904/2008
Book title: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking
Pages: 135-146
Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
   
Note:
The powerpoint presentation is available at http://srikanth.sastry.name/documents/presentations/ICDCN_2008.ppt
Abstract:
We present a wait-free solution to the generalized dining philosophers problem under eventual weak exclusion in environments subject to crash faults. Wait-free dining guarantees that every correct hungry process eventually eats, regardless of process crashes. Eventual weak exclusion (WX) actually allows scheduling mistakes, whereby mutual exclusion may be violated finitely-many times; for each run, however, there must exist a convergence point after which live neighbors never eat simultaneously. Wait-free dining under WX is particularly useful for synchronization tasks where eventual safety is sufficient for correctness (e.g., duty-cycle scheduling, self-stabilizing daemons, and contention managers). Unfortunately, wait-free dining is unsolvable in asynchronous systems. As such, we characterize sufficient conditions for solvability under partial synchrony by presenting a wait-free dining algorithm for WX using a local refinement of the eventually perfect failure detector P_1.
Digital version