Affiliation:
1. EURECOM, Biot Sophia Antipolis cedex, France
2. IBM Research - Zurich, CH-8803 Rüschlikon, Switzerland
Abstract
Over the years, different meanings have been associated with the word
consistency
in the distributed systems community. While in the ’80s “consistency” typically meant
strong consistency
, later defined also as
linearizability
, in recent years, with the advent of highly available and scalable systems, the notion of “consistency” has been at the same time both weakened and blurred.
In this article, we aim to fill the void in the literature by providing a structured and comprehensive overview of different consistency notions that appeared in distributed systems, and in particular
storage
systems research, in the last four decades. We overview more than 50 different consistency notions, ranging from linearizability to eventual and weak consistency, defining precisely many of these, in particular where the previous definitions were ambiguous. We further provide a partial order among different consistency predicates, ordering them by their semantic “strength,” which we believe will be useful in future research. Finally, we map the consistency semantics to different practical systems and research prototypes.
The scope of this article is restricted to non-transactional semantics, that is, those that apply to single storage object operations. As such, our article complements the existing surveys done in the context of transactional, database consistency semantics.
Funder
SUPERCLOUD Horizon 2020 program
EU projects CloudSpaces
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Subject
General Computer Science,Theoretical Computer Science
Reference146 articles.
1. Weak ordering---a new definition
2. Shared memory consistency models: a tutorial
3. A unified formalization of four shared-memory models
4. Atul Adya. 1999. Weak Consistency: A Generalized Theory and Optimistic Implementations for Distributed Transactions. Ph.D. Dissertation. MIT Cambridge MA. Also as Technical Report MIT/LCS/TR-786. Atul Adya. 1999. Weak Consistency: A Generalized Theory and Optimistic Implementations for Distributed Transactions. Ph.D. Dissertation. MIT Cambridge MA. Also as Technical Report MIT/LCS/TR-786.
5. The power of processor consistency
Cited by
81 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献