A Unified Theory of Shared Memory Consistency

Abstract

Memory consistency models have been developed to specify what values may be returned by a read given that, in a distributed system, memory operations may only be partially ordered. Before this work, consistency models were defined independently. Each model followed a set of rules which was separate from the rules of every other model. In our work we have defined a set of four consistency properties. Any subset of the four properties yields a set of rules which constitute a consistency model. Every consistency model previously described in the literature can be defined based on our four properties. Therefore, we present these properties as a unfied theory of shared memory consistency.