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Maurice Herlihy

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description Maurice Herlihy Overview

Maurice Herlihy is a computer scientist at Brown University whose work established foundational concepts in concurrent and distributed computing. With Jeannette Wing, he defined linearizability, the standard correctness condition for concurrent objects, and with others introduced wait-free synchronization, characterizing the power of shared-memory primitives. He received the 2003 Dijkstra Prize for this work and later contributed to transactional memory. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

help Maurice Herlihy FAQ

What is linearizability as defined by Maurice Herlihy?

Linearizability, formalized by Herlihy and Wing in 1990, is a consistency model for concurrent objects where each operation appears to take effect instantaneously at some point between its invocation and response. It ensures that concurrent execution behaves as an interleaving of sequential operations, preserving real-time ordering guarantees.

What is wait-free synchronization?

Herlihy defined wait-free synchronization in a 1991 paper as a technique where each thread can complete any operation in a bounded number of steps regardless of the speed or failure of other threads. He proved that certain fundamental objects, like compare-and-swap, are universal primitives capable of implementing any wait-free data structure.

Where does Maurice Herlihy work?

Maurice Herlihy is a professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he works on distributed computing, concurrent data structures, and multiprocessor synchronization. He received his PhD from MIT.

What textbook did Maurice Herlihy co-author?

Herlihy co-authored 'The Art of Multiprocessor Programming' with Nir Shavit, a widely used textbook on concurrent data structures and synchronization algorithms. The book received the ACM SIGCSE award for outstanding contribution to computer science education.