(weapons) deriving destructive energy from the release of atomic energy; "nuclear war"; "nuclear weapons"; "atomic bombs"
a set of operations is said to be atomic when they execute all at once and cannot be preempted.
a set of operations is said to be atomic when it executes all in once, and cannot be interrupted.
(adj.) Characteristic of an operation that is never interrupted or left in an incomplete state under any circumstance.
An operation is atomic if all of its effects are visible to other CPUs together when the proper access protocol is followed. In the degenerate case are atomic instructions provided directly by machine architectures. At a higher level, if several members of a structure are protected by a lock, then a set of operations are atomic if they are all performed while holding the lock without releasing the lock in between any of the operations. See Also: operation.
Refers to an operation that is never interrupted or left in an incomplete state under any circumstance.
Of or relating to atoms. :-) In operating systems, this refers to the requirement that an operation, or sequence of operations, be considered indivisible. For example, a thread may need to move a file position to a given location and read data. These operations must be performed in an atomic manner; otherwise, another thread could preempt the original thread and move the file position to a different location, thus causing the original thread to read data from the second thread's position.
Not interruptible. An atomic operation is one that always appears to have been executed as a unit.
a set of operations is said to be atomic when it executes all at once, and cannot be preempted.
Smallest possible operation. An atomic operation is performed either entirely or not at all. For example, if machine failure prevents a transaction from completing, the system is rolled back to the start of the transaction, with no changes taking place.