The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Atomic concurrent objects, whose operations take place instantaneously, are a powerful technique for designing complex concurrent programs. Since they are not always available, they are typically substituted with software implementations. A prominent condition relating these implementations to their atomic specifications is linearizability, which preserves safety properties of programs using them. However linearizability does not preserve hyper-properties, which include probabilistic guarantees about randomized programs. A more restrictive property, strong linearizability, does preserve hyper-properties but it is impossible to achieve in many situations. In particular, we show that there are no strongly linearizable implementations of multi-writer registers or snapshot objects in message-passing systems. On the other hand, we show that a wide class of linearizable implementations, including well-known ones for registers and snapshots, can be modified to approximate the probabilistic guarantees of randomized programs when using atomic objects.