COMBINING ATOMIC ACTIONS

A combining network can combine concurrently issued operations on the same variable and fan out responses to the processes that issued the o perations. Combining networks have been proposed with the goals of red ucing message traffic, hotspots within the network, and contention for shared variables. This paper extends the class of operations that can be combined to include operations from flat atomic actions. We descri be a class of networks called isotach networks and show that isotach n etworks can correctly combine operations from different flat atomic ac tions. Also we show that isotach combining networks can combine pipeli ned operations without sacrificing sequential consistency. (C) 1995 Ac ademic Press, Inc.