Extending Causal Consistency to any Object Defined by a Sequential Specification

TL;DR

This paper generalizes causal consistency to any object with a sequential specification, enabling different processes to have consistent views of object histories based on causality captured by partial orders.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, general framework extending causal consistency to all objects defined by sequential specifications, broadening its applicability.

Findings

Causal consistency can be applied to any sequential object.

Different processes may have different views of object histories.

The approach captures causality via partial orders on operations.

Abstract

This paper presents a simple generalization of causal consistency suited to any object defined by a sequential specification. As causality is captured by a partial order on the set of operations issued by the processes on shared objects (concurrent operations are not ordered), it follows that causal consistency allows different processes to have different views of each object history.