Distributed Mutual Exclusion

Mutual exclusion is a concept in computer science that prevents race conditions by ensuring that one thread does not enter a critical section while another thread is already accessing it. This is important when multiple threads are trying to modify a shared resource, as it prevents data inconsistency. Mutual exclusion was first identified and solved by Edsger W. Dijkstra and is used to avoid race conditions in various scenarios, including the simultaneous writing and reading of a memory address by different threads.