Document Type

Technical Report

Department

Computer Science and Engineering

Publication Date

1993-01-01

Filename

WUCS-93-35.pdf

Technical Report Number

WUCS-93-35

Abstract

A unified model of distributed systems that accomodates both shared-memory and message-passing communication is proposed. An extension of the I/O automaton model of Lynch and Tuttle, the model provides a full range of types of atomic accesses to shared memory, from basic reads and writes to read-modify-write. In addition to supporting the specification and verification of shared memory algorithms, the unified model is particularly helpful for proving correspondences between atomic shared objects and invocation-response systems and for proving the correctness of systems that contain both message passing and shared memory (such as a network of shared-memory multiprocessors or a distributed memory multiprocessor with multi-threaded nodes). As an illustration of the model, we consider distributed systems in which the shared objects have the linearizability property proposed by Herlihy and Wing. We use the model to construct a careful proof that invocation-response systems constructed from linearizable objects simulate atomic shared memory systems. In addition, we extend the work of Herlihy and Wing by treating not only safety properties of invocation-response systems, but also liveness properties.

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Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K7QJ7FJG

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