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Main Authors: Castañeda, Armando, Martínez, Braulio Ramses Hernández
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16903
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author Castañeda, Armando
Martínez, Braulio Ramses Hernández
author_facet Castañeda, Armando
Martínez, Braulio Ramses Hernández
contents In the context of asynchronous concurrent shared-memory systems, a snapshot algorithm allows failure-prone processes to concurrently and atomically write on the entries of a shared array MEM , and also atomically read the whole array. Recently, Read-Modify-Writable (RMWable) snapshot was proposed, a variant of snapshot that allows processes to perform operations more complex than just read and write, specifically, each entry MEM[k] is an arbitrary readable object. The known RMWable snapshot algorithms heavily rely on powerful low-level operations such as compare&swap or load-link/store-conditional to correctly produce snapshots of MEM. Following the large body of research devoted to understand the limits of what can be solved using the simple read/write low-level operations, which are known to be strictly weaker than compare&swap and load-link/store-conditional, we explore if RMWable snapshots are possible using only read/write operations. We present two read/write RMWable snapshot algorithms, the first one in the standard concurrent shared-memory model where the number of processes n is finite and known in advance, and the second one in a variant of the standard model with unbounded concurrency, where there are infinitely many processes, but at any moment only finitely many processes participate in an execution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_16903
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Read-Modify-Writable Snapshots from Read/Write operations
Castañeda, Armando
Martínez, Braulio Ramses Hernández
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
In the context of asynchronous concurrent shared-memory systems, a snapshot algorithm allows failure-prone processes to concurrently and atomically write on the entries of a shared array MEM , and also atomically read the whole array. Recently, Read-Modify-Writable (RMWable) snapshot was proposed, a variant of snapshot that allows processes to perform operations more complex than just read and write, specifically, each entry MEM[k] is an arbitrary readable object. The known RMWable snapshot algorithms heavily rely on powerful low-level operations such as compare&swap or load-link/store-conditional to correctly produce snapshots of MEM. Following the large body of research devoted to understand the limits of what can be solved using the simple read/write low-level operations, which are known to be strictly weaker than compare&swap and load-link/store-conditional, we explore if RMWable snapshots are possible using only read/write operations. We present two read/write RMWable snapshot algorithms, the first one in the standard concurrent shared-memory model where the number of processes n is finite and known in advance, and the second one in a variant of the standard model with unbounded concurrency, where there are infinitely many processes, but at any moment only finitely many processes participate in an execution.
title Read-Modify-Writable Snapshots from Read/Write operations
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16903