The Assignment Problem
Article No.: 14, Pages 1 - 9
Abstract
In the allocation problem, asynchronous processors must partition a set of items so that each processor leave knowing all items exclusively allocated to it. We introduce a new variant of the allocation problem called the assignment problem, in which processors might leave having only partial knowledge of their assigned items. The missing items in a processor's assignment must eventually be announced by other processors.
While allocation has consensus power 2, we show that the assignment problem is solvable read-write wait-free when k processors compete for at least 2k --1 items. Moreover, we propose a long-lived read-write wait-free assignment algorithm which is fair, allocating no more than 2 items per processor, and in which a slow processor may delay the assignment of at most n items, where n is the number of processors.
The assignment problem and its read-write solution may be of practical interest for implementing resource allocators and work queues, which are pervasive concurrent programming patterns, as well as stream-processing systems.
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Index Terms
- The Assignment Problem
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The assignment problem
Highlights- Shared memory.
- Fault tolerance.
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Published In
January 2018
494 pages
ISBN:9781450363723
DOI:10.1145/3154273
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Published: 04 January 2018
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ICDCN '18
ICDCN '18: 19th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking
January 4 - 7, 2018
Varanasi, India
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