Abstract
Locality is a property of consistency conditions indicating that any collection of implementations of a consistency condition C for disjoint subsets of objects is an implementation of C for the entire set of objects. This paper investigates the sources of locality by considering the general model of consistency conditions and capturing their properties. We establish several ways of constructing local conditions as well as new general techniques for analyzing locality of consistency conditions that do not depend on a particular type of shared object. These techniques allow us to formally prove non-locality of a) all conditions stronger than sequential consistency but weaker than or incomparable to linearizability, b) all conditions stronger than or incomparable to coherence but weaker than sequential consistency, and c) a range of conditions that require sequences of operations to execute atomically. These results cover most commonly used consistency conditions as well as many other conditions useful in the context of specific systems.
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Vitenberg, R., Friedman, R. (2003). On the Locality of Consistency Conditions. In: Fich, F.E. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2848. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39989-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39989-6_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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