Skip to content
scrambled
Parallel And Distributed Programming Concept

Universal Atomic Instruction

Depends on JourneyParallel And Distributed Programming Statuslearning Tags
  • parallel programming

An atomic instruction is universal if it can implement any concurrent object in a wait-free manner for any number of processes. Equivalently, it has a consensus number of infinity.

Compare-and-Swap (CAS) is the canonical universal atomic instruction. Read/write registers and Fetch-and-Add are not universal: They can only solve consensus for 1 and 2 processes, respectively.