Relaxed Memory Model Zoo

Monotonic Reads (Session Guarantee) (MR)
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Monotonic Reads (Session Guarantee) MR

1994 · Terry, Demers, Petersen, Spreitzer, Theimer, Welch · theoretical, formal · axiomatic formalism

Monotonic reads session guarantee of Terry et al. (PDIS 1994): successive reads within a session reflect a non-decreasing set of writes, i.e. a session never observes an earlier state after observing a later one. One of the four session guarantees. Brzezinski et al. (2003) proved PRAM = read-your-writes ∧ monotonic reads ∧ monotonic writes (Viotti & Vukolić 2016, Eq. 20), so monotonic reads alone is strictly weaker than PRAM.

Properties

Property vector author-extrapolated — set only where the model’s definition pins the cell down (unknown cells are omitted); cells citing a specific source are marked.

Reasoning guarantees
  • no Coherence
Atomicity guarantees
  • no Multicopy atomic

Ordering relationships

Strictly weaker than
  • PRAM (Pipelined RAM) Consistency — Brzezinski et al. (2003) proved PRAM = read-your-writes ∧ monotonic reads ∧ monotonic writes (Viotti & Vukolić 2016, Eq. 20). PRAM implies monotonic reads while the converse fails, so monotonic reads is strictly weaker than PRAM.

References

  • Douglas B. Terry, Alan J. Demers, Karin Petersen, Mike Spreitzer, Marvin Theimer, Brent B. Welch. Session Guarantees for Weakly Consistent Replicated Data. Parallel and Distributed Information Systems (PDIS), 1994. doi:10.1109/PDIS.1994.331722
  • Jerzy Brzezinski, Cezary Sobaniec, Dariusz Wawrzyniak. Session Guarantees to Achieve PRAM Consistency of Replicated Shared Objects. Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM), LNCS 3019, 2003. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-24669-5_1
  • Paolo Viotti, Marko Vukolić. Consistency in Non-Transactional Distributed Storage Systems. ACM Computing Surveys 49(1), 2016. doi:10.1145/2926965