On Register Linearizability and Termination

TL;DR

This paper explores the limitations of linearizability in randomized algorithms, introduces write strong-linearizability as a new consistency condition, and demonstrates its implications for implementing registers in distributed systems.

Contribution

It defines write strong-linearizability, shows its advantages over linearizability, and proves its feasibility and necessity in certain distributed register implementations.

Findings

Termination can be lost when replacing atomic objects with linearizable objects in randomized algorithms.

Write strong-linearizability is strictly stronger than linearizability but weaker than strong linearizability.

Any linearizable SWMR register implementation is necessarily write strongly-linearizable.

Abstract

In a seminal work, Golab et al. showed that a randomized algorithm that works with atomic objects may lose some of its properties if we replace the atomic objects that it uses with linearizable objects. It was not known whether the properties that can be lost include the important property of termination (with probability 1). In this paper, we first show that, for randomized algorithms, termination can indeed be lost. Golab et al. also introduced strong linearizability, and proved that strongly linearizable objects can be used as if they were atomic objects, even for randomized algorithms: they preserve the algorithm's correctness properties, including termination. Unfortunately, there are important cases where strong linearizability is impossible to achieve. In particular, Helmi et al. MWMR registers do not have strongly linearizable implementations from SWMR registers. So we propose a new type of register linearizability, called write strong-linearizability, that is strictly stronger than linearizability but strictly weaker than strong linearizability. We prove that some randomized algorithms that fail to terminate with linearizable registers, work with write strongly-linearizable ones. In other words, there are cases where linearizability is not sufficient but write strong-linearizability is. In contrast to the impossibility result mentioned above, we prove that write strongly-linearizable MWMR registers are implementable from SWMR registers. Achieving write strong-linearizability, however, is harder than achieving just linearizability: we give a simple implementation of MWMR registers from SWMR registers and we prove that this implementation is linearizable but not write strongly-linearizable. Finally, we prove that any linearizable implementation of SWMR registers is necessarily write strongly-linearizable; this holds for shared-memory, message-passing, and hybrid systems.