In this paper, we prove that transactions cannot be fast in an asynchronous system. Specifically, we show that a system cannot be fault-tolerant and provide fast transactions. Our result holds in any system where we require transactions to ensure monotonic writes, or any stronger consistency model, such as, causal consistency. Thus, our result unveils an important, and so far unknown, limitation of fast transactions: they are impossible if we want to tolerate the failure of even one server.
Abstract. Establishing the scalability of a concurrent algorithm a priori, before implementing and evaluating it on a concrete multi-core platform, seems difficult, if not impossible. In the context of search data structures however, according to all practical work of the past decade, algorithms that scale share a common characteristic: They all resemble standard sequential implementations for their respective data structure type and strive to minimize the number of synchronization operations.In this paper, we present sequential proximity, a theoretical framework to determine whether a concurrent search algorithm is close to its sequential counterpart. With sequential proximity we take the first step towards a theory of scalability for concurrent search algorithms.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.