How Fast can a Distributed Atomic Read be?

We study efficient and robust implementations of an atomic read-write data structure over an asynchronous distributed message-passing system made of reader and writer processes, as well as failure prone server processes implementing the data structure. We determine the exact conditions under which every read operation involves one-round of communication with the servers. These conditions relate the number of readers to the tolerated number of faulty servers, in a general model with crash and arbitrary failures.