The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Chapter 3. Concurrent Objects

The behavior of concurrent objects is best described through their safety and liveness properties, often referred to as correctness and progress. In this chapter we examine various ways of specifying correctness and progress.

While all notions of correctness for concurrent objects are based on some notion of equivalence with sequential behavior, different notions are appropriate for different systems. We examine three correctness conditions. Quiescent consistency is appropriate for applications that require high performance at the cost of placing relatively weak constraints on object behavior. Sequential consistency is a stronger condition, often useful for describing low-level systems such as hardware memory interfaces. ...