Group colloquium: Is speed-independent mutual exclusion implementable?

When: June 28, 2018, 15:45-16:45

Where: RA 3334

Who: Rob van Glabbeek

A mutual exclusion algorithm is called speed independent if its
correctness does not depend on the relative speed of the components.
Famous mutual exclusion protocols such as Dekker's, Peterson's and
Lamport's bakery are meant to be speed independent.

In this talk I argue that speed-independent mutual exclusion may not
be implementable on standard hardware, depending on how we believe
reading and writing to a memory location is really carried out.
It can be implemented on electrical circuits, however.

This builds on previous work showing that mutual exclusion cannot be
accurately modelled in standard process algebras.