A Wait-Free Multi-word Atomic (1,N) Register for Large-Scale Data Sharing on Multi-core Machines

We present a multi-word atomic (1,N) register for multi-core machines exploiting Read-Modify-Write (RMW) instructions to coordinate the writer and the readers in a wait-free manner. Our proposal, called Anonymous Readers Counting (ARC), enables large-scale data sharing by admitting up to 2^(32) - 2 concurrent readers on off-the-shelf 64-bit machines, as opposed to the most advanced RMW-based approach which is limited to 58 readers. Further, ARC avoids multiple copies of the register content while accessing it—this affects classical register’s algorithms based on atomic read/write operations on single words. Thus, ARC allows for higher scalability with respect to the register size.