Title
On The Importance Of Registers For Computability
Abstract
All consensus hierarchies in the literature assume that we have, in addition to copies of a given object, an unbounded number of registers. But why do we really need these registers?This paper considers what would happen if one attempts to solve consensus using various objects but without any registers. We show that under a reasonable assumption, objects like queues and stacks cannot emulate the missing registers. We also show that, perhaps surprisingly, initialization, shown to have no computational consequences when registers are readily available, is crucial in determining the synchronization power of objects when no registers are allowed. Finally, we show that without registers, the number of available objects affects the level of consensus that can be solved.Our work thus raises the question of whether consensus hierarchies which assume an unbounded number of registers truly capture synchronization power, and begins a line of research aimed at better understanding the interaction between read-write memory and the powerful synchronization operations available on modern architectures.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1007/978-3-319-14472-6_12
PRINCIPLES OF DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS, OPODIS 2014
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Journal
8878
0302-9743
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
6
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rati Gelashvili16811.84
Mohsen Ghaffari245244.89
Jerry Li322922.67
Nir Shavit43780244.84