'Cause I'm Strong Enough: Reasoning about Consistency Choices in Distributed Systems
Large-scale distributed systems often rely on replicated databases that allow a programmer to request different data consistency guarantees for different operations, and thereby control their performance. Using such databases is far from trivial: requesting stronger consistency in too many places may hurt performance, and requesting it in too few places may violate correctness. To help programmers in this task, we propose the first proof rule for establishing that a particular choice of consistency guarantees for various operations on a replicated database is enough to ensure the preservation of a given data integrity invariant. Our rule is modular: it allows reasoning about the behaviour of every operation separately under some assumption on the behaviour of other operations. This leads to simple reasoning, which we have automated in an SMT-based tool. We present a nontrivial proof of soundness of our rule and illustrate its use on several examples.
Thu 21 JanDisplayed time zone: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey change
10:30 - 12:10 | Track 1: Foundations of distributed systemsResearch Papers at Grand Bay North Chair(s): Mooly Sagiv Tel Aviv University | ||
10:30 25mTalk | Certified Causally Consistent Distributed Key-Value Stores Research Papers Media Attached | ||
10:55 25mTalk | 'Cause I'm Strong Enough: Reasoning about Consistency Choices in Distributed Systems Research Papers Alexey Gotsman IMDEA, Hongseok Yang University of Oxford, UK, Carla Ferreira Universidade Nova Lisboa, Mahsa Najafzadeh UPMC & INRIA, Marc Shapiro Inria & LIP6 Media Attached | ||
11:20 25mTalk | A Program Logic for Concurrent Objects under Fair Scheduling Research Papers Hongjin Liang University of Science and Technology of China, Xinyu Feng University of Science and Technology of China Media Attached | ||
11:45 25mTalk | PSync: a partially synchronous language for fault-tolerant distributed algorithms Research Papers Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached File Attached |