Recoverable Mutual Exclusion

This book discusses the recent research work on designing efficient fault-tolerant synchronization mechanisms for concurrent processes using the relatively new persistent memory technology that combines the low latency benefits of DRAM with the persistence of magnetic disks. The authors include all of the major contributions published to date, and also convey some perspective regarding how the problem itself is evolving. The results are described at a high level to enable readers to gain a quick and thorough understanding of the RME problem and its nuances, as well as various solutions that have been designed to solve the problem under a variety of important conditions and how they compare to each other.

Introduction.- Persistent Memory.- Prior Work.- Problem Formulation.- Load and Store based Algorithms.- Sublogarithmic Algorithms.- Adaptive Algorithms.- Constant Amortized Complexity Algorithm.- Abortable Recoverable Mutual Exclusion.- Tight Lower Bound.- System Wide Failures.-

Sahil Dhoked, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist at Meta Platforms. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2022 under the supervision of Dr. Neeraj Mittal. He received his B.Tech. degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Indore in 2013. He previously worked as a software development engineer at Microsoft.

Wojciech Golab, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Toronto in 2010. In the same year, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary and later joined Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto as a Research Scientist. He is broadly interested in concurrency and fault tolerance in distributed systems, with a special focus on bridging the gap between theory and practice.

Neeraj Mittal, Ph.D., is a Pofessor in theDepartment of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas and Co-director of the Advanced Networking and Dependable System Laboratory (ANDES). He received his B.Tech. degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1995 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1997 and 2002, respectively.  His research interests include multi-core computing, distributed computing, fault tolerant computing, and distributed algorithms for wireless networking.