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On Composition and Implementation of Sequential Consistency

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Book cover Distributed Computing (DISC 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9888))

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Abstract

To implement a linearizable shared memory in synchronous message-passing systems it is necessary to wait for a time linear to the uncertainty in the latency of the network for both read and write operations. Waiting only for one of them suffices for sequential consistency. This paper extends this result to crash-prone asynchronous systems, proposing a distributed algorithm that builds a sequentially consistent shared snapshot memory on top of an asynchronous message-passing system where less than half of the processes may crash. We prove that waiting is needed only when a process invokes a read/snapshot right after a write.

We also show that sequential consistency is composable in some cases commonly encountered: (1) objects that would be linearizable if they were implemented on top of a linearizable memory become sequentially consistent when implemented on top of a sequential memory while remaining composable and (2) in round-based algorithms, where each object is only accessed within one round.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by the Franco-German ANR project DISCMAT under grant agreement ANR-14-CE35-0010-01.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LINA – University of Nantes, Nantes, France

    Matthieu Perrin, Matoula Petrolia, Achour Mostéfaoui & Claude Jard

Authors
  1. Matthieu Perrin
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  2. Matoula Petrolia
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  3. Achour Mostéfaoui
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  4. Claude Jard
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matthieu Perrin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. LABRI, Univ of Bordeaux LABRI, Talence Cedex, France

    Cyril Gavoille

  2. CNRS, Universite Bordeaux 1 CNRS, Talence Cedex, France

    David Ilcinkas

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Perrin, M., Petrolia, M., Mostéfaoui, A., Jard, C. (2016). On Composition and Implementation of Sequential Consistency. In: Gavoille, C., Ilcinkas, D. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9888. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53426-7_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53426-7_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-53425-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-53426-7

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