) Harry Buhrman 1 , Alessandro Panconesi 2 , Riccardo Silvestri 3 , and Paul Vitanyi1 1 CWI, Amsterdam 2 Informatica, Universita di Bologna, 3 Informatica, Universita de L'Aquila Abstract. We show that Naming{ the existence of distinct IDs known to all{ is a necessary assumption of Herlihy's universality result for Consensus. We then show in a very precise sense that Naming is harder than Consensus and bring to the surface some important dierences existing between popular shared memory models which usually remain unnoticed. 1 Introduction The consensus problem enjoys a well-deserved reputation in the (theoretical) distributed computing community. Among others, a seminal paper of Herlihy added further evidence in support of the claim that consensus is indeed a key theoretical construct [12]. Herlihy's paper considers the following problem: Suppose that, besides a shared memory, the hardware of our asynchronous, parallel machine is equipped with objects (instantia...

Abstract. We consider a population of anonymous processes communicating via anonymous message-passing, where the recipient of each message is chosen by an adversary and the sender is not identified to the recipient. Even with unbounded message sizes and process states, such a system can compute only limited predicates on inputs held by the processes. In the finite-state case, we show how the exact strength of the model depends critically on design choices that are irrelevant in the unbounded-state case, such as whether messages are delivered immediately or after a delay, whether a sender can record that it has sent a message, and whether a recipient can queue incoming messages, refusing to accept new messages until it has had a chance to send out messages of its own. These results may have implications for the design of distributed systems where processor power is severely limited, as in sensor networks. 1

the date of receipt and acceptance should be inserted later Abstract We study the power of reliable anonymous distributed systems, where processes do not fail, do not have identifiers, and run identical programmes. We are interested specifically in the relative powers of systems with different communication mechanisms: anonymous broadcast, read-write registers, or read-write registers plus additional shared-memory objects. We show that a system with anonymous broadcast can simulate a system of shared-memory objects if and only if the objects satisfy a property we call idemdicence; this result holds regardless of whether either system is synchronous or asynchronous. Conversely, the key to simulating anonymous broadcast in anonymous shared memory is the ability to count: broadcast can be simulated by an asynchronous shared-memory system that uses only counters, but readwrite registers by themselves are not enough. We further examine the relative power of different types and sizes of bounded counters and conclude with a non-robustness result.

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Abstract. Most people believe that renaming is easy: simply choose a name at random; if more than one process selects the same name, then try again. We highlight the issues that occur when trying to implement such a scheme and shed new light on the read-write complexity of randomized renaming in an asynchronous environment. At the heart of our new perspective stands an adaptive implementation of a randomized test-and-set object, that has poly-logarithmic step complexity per operation, with high probability. Interestingly, our implementation is anonymous, as it does not require process identifiers. Based on this implementation, we present two new randomized renaming algorithms. The first ensures a tight namespace of n names using O(n log 4 n) total steps, with high probability. This significantly improves on the complexity of the best previously known namespace-optimal algorithms. The second algorithm achieves a namespace of size k(1 + ɛ) using O(k log 4 k / log 2 (1 + ɛ)) total steps, both with high probability, where k is the total contention in the execution. It is the first adaptive randomized renaming algorithm, and it improves on existing deterministic solutions by providing a smaller namespace, and by lowering step complexity. 1

We study the complexity of renaming, a fundamental problem in distributed computing in which a set of processes need to pick distinct names from a given namespace. We prove an individual lower bound of Ω(k) process steps for deterministic renaming into any namespace of size sub-exponential in k, where k is the number of participants. This bound is tight: it draws an exponential separation between deterministic and randomized solutions, and implies new tight bounds for deterministic fetch-and-increment registers, queues and stacks. The proof of the bound is interesting in its own right, for it relies on the first reduction from renaming to another fundamental problem in distributed computing: mutual exclusion. We complement our individual bound with a global lower bound of Ω(k log(k/c)) on the total step complexity of renaming into a namespace of size ck, for any c ≥ 1. This applies to randomized algorithms against a strong adversary, and helps derive new global lower bounds for randomized approximate counter and fetch-and-increment implementations, all tight within logarithmic factors. 1

We show that Naming -- the existence of distinct IDs known to all -- is a hidden, but necessary, assumption of Herlihy's universality result for Consensus. We then show in a very precise sense that Naming is harder than Consensus and bring to the surface some important differences existing between popular shared memory models which usually remain unnoticed.

Abstract The vast majority of papers on distributed computing assume that processes are assigned unique identifiers before computation begins. But is this assumption necessary? What if processes do not have unique identifiers or do not wish to divulge them for reasons of privacy? We consider asynchronous shared-memory systems that are anonymous. The shared memory contains only the most common type of shared objects, read/write registers. We investigate, for the first time, what can be implemented deterministically in this model when processes can fail. We give anonymous algorithms for some fundamental problems: time-stamping, snapshots and consensus. Our solutions to the first two are wait-free and the third is obstruction-free. We also show that a shared object has an obstruction-free implementation if and only if it satisfies a simple property called idempotence. To prove the sufficiency of this condition, we give a universal construction that implements any idempotent object.