Atomic shared register access by asynchronous hardware

Abstract

The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we describe two ways to construct multivalued atomic n-writer n-reader registers. The first solution uses atomic 1-writer 1-reader registers and unbounded tags. the other solution uses atomic 1-writer n-reader registers and bounded tags. The second part of the paper develops a general methodology to prove atomicity, by identifying a set of criteria which guaranty an effective construction for the required atomic mapping. We apply the method to prove atomicity of the two implementations for atomic multiwriter multireader registers.