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.
CITATION STYLE
Blanchard, P., Guerraoui, R., Stainer, J., & Zablotchi, I. (2017). The disclosure power of shared objects. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 10299 LNCS, pp. 222–227). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59647-1_17
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