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Communication Requirements for Linearizable Registers

Authors Raïssa Nataf , Yoram Moses

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Author Details

Raïssa Nataf
  • Technion, Haifa, Israel
Yoram Moses
  • Technion, Haifa, Israel

Funding

Yoram Moses is the Israel Pollak academic chair at the Technion. This work was supported in part by the Israel Science Foundation under grant ISF 2061/19.

Acknowledgements

We thank Gal Assa, Naama Ben David, and an anonymous referee for very useful comments that improved the presentation of this paper. We alone are responsible for any errors or misrepresentations.

Cite As Get BibTex

Raïssa Nataf and Yoram Moses. Communication Requirements for Linearizable Registers. In 38th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 319, pp. 33:1-33:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2024.33

Abstract

While linearizability is a fundamental correctness condition for distributed systems, ensuring the linearizability of implementations can be quite complex. An essential aspect of linearizable implementations of concurrent objects is the need to preserve the real-time order of operations. In many settings, however, processes cannot determine the precise timing and relative real-time ordering of operations. Indeed, in an asynchronous system, the only ordering information available to them is based on the fact that sending a message precedes its delivery. We show that as a result, message chains must be used extensively to ensure linearizability. This paper studies the communication requirements of linearizable implementations of atomic registers in asynchronous message passing systems. We start by proving two general theorems that relate message chains to the ability to delay and reorder actions and operations in an execution of an asynchronous system, without the changes being noticeable to the processes. These are then used to prove that linearizable register implementations must create extensive message chains among operations of all types. In particular, our results imply that linearizable implementations in asynchronous systems are necessarily costly and nontrivial, and provide insight into their structure.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Distributed algorithms
Keywords
  • linearizability
  • atomic registers
  • asynchrony
  • message chains
  • real time

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