Abstract
Shared objects are the means by which processes gather and exchange information about the state of a distributed system. Objects that disclose more information about the system are therefore more desirable. In this paper, we propose the schedule reconstruction (SR) problem as a new metric for the disclosure power of shared memory objects. In schedule reconstruction, processes take steps which are interleaved to form a schedule; each process needs to be able to reconstruct the schedule up to its last step. We show that objects can be ranked in a hierarchy according to their ability to solve SR. In this hierarchy, stronger objects can implement weaker objects via a SR-based universal construction. We identify a connection between SR and consensus and prove that SR is at least as hard as consensus. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that objects that are powerful in solving consensus—such as compare-and-swap—are not always powerful in their ability to solve SR.
This work has been supported in part by the European ERC Grant 339539 (AOC).
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Blanchard, P., Guerraoui, R., Stainer, J., Zablotchi, I.: The disclosure power of shared objects. Technical report, EPFL (2017)
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Blanchard, P., Guerraoui, R., Stainer, J., Zablotchi, I. (2017). The Disclosure Power of Shared Objects. In: El Abbadi, A., Garbinato, B. (eds) Networked Systems. NETYS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10299. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59647-1_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59647-1_17
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