We are excited to host John Valois speaking on Wait-Free Synchronization
Talk:
How do we implement data structures in a shared memory environment? The conventional answer is to use mutual exclusion, but this approach does not behave well when we encounter delays or failures in the critical section, forcing other processes to wait.
Wait-Free Synchronization by Maurice Herlihy (https://cs.brown.edu/~mph/Herlihy91/p124-herlihy.pdf) explores an idea which ensures that operations complete in finite time regardless of the relative speeds of other processes. We’ll see a connection to the ubiquitous consensus problem and a framework for understanding what synchronization primitives are necessary and sufficient for implementing a given object, culminating in a method for implementing any object in a wait-free manner.
Bio:
John Valois is a Managing Director at BlackRock where he works on core platform engineering.
