We establish a theorem called the PCL theorem, which states that it is impossible to design a transactional memory algorithm that ensures (1) parallelism, i.e., transactions do not need to synchronize unless they access the same application objects, (2) ve ...
The history of distributed computing is full of trade-offs between safety and liveness. For instance, one of the most celebrated results in the field, namely the impossibility of consensus in an asynchronous system basically says that we cannot devise an a ...
The correctness of a shared object, which can be accessed by several processes concurrently, is specified through two different kinds of properties - safety and liveness. When implementing a shared object it is important to specify its correctness in a suc ...
We show that it is impossible to design a transactional memory system which ensures parallelism, i.e. transactions do not need to synchronize unless they access the same application objects, while ensuring very little consistency, i.e. a consistency condit ...
