Practically Stabilizing Atomic Memory

A self-stabilizing simulation of a single-writer multi-reader atomic register is presented. The simulation works in asynchronous message-passing systems, and allows processes to crash, as long as at least a majority of them remain working. A key element in the simulation is a new combinatorial construction of a bounded labeling scheme that can accommodate arbitrary labels, i.e., including those not generated by the scheme itself. Sackler School of Mathematics and Blavatnik School of Computer Science, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 69978, Israel. Email: [email protected]. Research supported in part by an ERC advanced grant, by a USA-Israeli BSF grant, by the Israel Science Foundation. Department of Computer Science, Technion, 32000, Israel. Email: [email protected]. Research supported in part by the Israel Science Foundation (grant number 953/06). Contact author. Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel. Email: [email protected]. The work started while this author was a visiting professor at LIP6. Research supported in part by the ICT Programme of the European Union under contract number FP7-215270 (FRONTS), Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom, US Air-Force and Rita Altura Trust Chair in Computer Sciences. LIP6, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 6/INRIA, 7606, France.