Allowing atomic objects to coexist with sequentially consistent objects

Abstract

A concurrent object is an object that can be concurrently accessed by several processes. Two well known consistency criteria for such objects are atomic consistency (also called linearizability) and sequential consistency. Both criteria require that all the operations on all the concurrent objects be totally ordered in such a way that each read operation obtains the last value written into the corresponding object. They differ in the meaning of the word "last" that refers to physical time for atomic consistency, and to logical time for sequential consistency. This paper investigates the merging of these consistency criteria. It presents a protocol that allows the upper layer multiprocess program to use simultaneously both types of consistency: purely atomic objects can coexist with purely sequentially consistent objects. The protocol is built on top of a message passing asynchronous distributed system. Interestingly, this protocol is generic in the sense that it can be tailored to provide only one of these consistency criteria. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.