Causality and atomicity in distributed computations

Abstract

In a distributed system, high-level actions can be modeled by nonatomic events. This paper proposes causality relations between distributed nonatomic events and provides efficient testing conditions for the relations. The relations provide a fine-grained granularity to specify causality relations between distributed nonatomic events. The set of relations between nonatomic events is complete in first-order predicate logic, using only the causality relation between atomic events. For a pair of distributed nonatomic events X and Y, the evaluation of any of the causality relations requires |N X | × |N Y | integer comparisons, where |N X | and |N Y |, respectively, are the number of nodes on which the two nonatomic events X and Y occur. In this paper, we show that this polynomial complexity of evaluation can by simplified to a linear complexity using properties of partial orders. Specifically, we show that most relations can be evaluated in min(|N X |,|N Y |) integer comparisons, some in |N X | integer comparisons, and the others in |N Y | integer comparisons. During the derivation of the efficient testing conditions, we also define special system execution prefixes associated with distributed nonatomic events and examine their knowledge-theoretic significance.