OTHER CONSISTENCY MODELS
Models of
memory consistency can be divided into uniform models, which do not distinguish
between types of memory access, and hybrid models, which do distinguish between
ordinary and synchronization accesses (as well as other types of access).
Other
uniform consistency models include:
Causal
consistency: Reads and writes may be related by the happened-before
relationship . This is defined to hold between memory operations when either
(a) they are made by the same process; (b) a process reads a value written by
another process; or (c) there exists a sequence of such operations linking the
two operations. The model’s constraint is that the value returned by a read
must be consistent with the happened-before relationship.
Processor
consistency: The memory is both coherent and adheres to the pipelined RAM model
(see below). The simplest way to think of processor consistency is that the
memory is coherent and that all processes agree on the ordering of any two
write accesses made by the same process
that is,
they agree with its program order.
Pipelined
RAM: All processors agree on the order of writes issued by any given processor
In addition to release consistency, hybrid models include:
Entry
consistency: Entry consistency was proposed for the Midway DSM system. In this
model, every shared variable is bound to a synchronization object such as a
lock, which governs access to that variable. Any process that first acquires
the lock is guaranteed to read the latest value of the variable. A process
wishing to write the variable must first obtain the corresponding lock in
‘exclusive’
mode – making it the only process able to access the variable.
Several
processes may read the variable concurrently by holding the lock in
nonexclusive mode. Midway avoids the tendency to false sharing in release consistency,
but at the expense of increased programming complexity.
Scope
consistency: This memory model [Iftode et al. 1996] attempts to simplify the
programming model of entry consistency. In scope consistency, variables are
associated with synchronization objects largely automatically instead of
relying on the programmer to associate locks with variables explicitly. For
example, the system can monitor which variables are updated in a critical
section.
Weak
consistency: Weak consistency [Dubois et al. 1988] does not distinguish between
acquire and release synchronization accesses. One of its guarantees is that all
previous ordinary accesses complete before either type of synchronization
access completes.
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