Efficient Fetch-and-Increment

Process Coordination with Fetch - and - Increment by Eric

The fetch-and-add (F&A) operation has been used effectively in a number of process coordination algorithms. In this paper we assess the power of fetch-and-increment (F&I) and fetch-anddecrement (F&D), which we view as restricted forms of F&A in which the only addends permitted are ±1. F&A-based algorithms that use only unit addends are thus trivially expressed with just F&I and F&D. Our primary...

The Instancy of Snapshots and Commuting Objects

We present a sequence of constructions of commuting synchronization objects (e.g., fetch-and-increment and fetch-and-add) in a system of n processors from any two processor synchronization object whose consensus number is two or more Her91a]. Each implementation in the sequence uses a particular type of shared memory snapshot, as a building block. Later implementations in the sequence are based...

An Optimal Implementation of Fetch-and-Increment

Towards Reduced Instruction Sets for Synchronization

Contrary to common belief, a recent work by Ellen, Gelashvili, Shavit, and Zhu has shown that computability does not require multicore architectures to support “strong” synchronization instructions like compare-and-swap, as opposed to combinations of “weaker” instructions like decrement and multiply . However, this is the status quo, and in turn, most efficient concurrent data-structures heavil...

The counting pyramid: an adaptive distributed counting scheme

A distributed counter is a concurrent object which provides a fetch-and-increment operation on a shared value. On the basis of a distributed counter, one can implement various fundamental data structures, such as queues or stacks. We present the counting pyramid, an efficient implementation of a distributed counter in a message passing system, which is based on software combining. The counting ...