A Coded Shared Atomic Memory Algorithm for Message Passing Architectures

This paper considers the communication and storage costs of emulating atomic (linearizable) multi-writer multi-reader shared memory in distributed message-passing systems. The paper contains two main contributions: 1) We present an atomic shared-memory emulation algorithm that we call Coded Atomic Storage (CAS). This algorithm uses erasure coding methods. In a storage system with 'N' servers that is resilient to 'f' server failures, we show that the communication cost of CAS is N/(N-2f). The storage cost of CAS is unbounded. 2) We present a variant of CAS known as CAS with Garbage Collection (CASGC). The CASGC algorithm is parametrized by an integer 'd' and has a bounded storage cost. We show that in every execution where the number of write operations that are concurrent with a read operation is no bigger than d, the CASGC algorithm with parameter d satisfies atomicity and liveness. We explicitly characterize the storage cost of CASGC, and show that it has the same communication cost as CAS.