On the composability of consistency conditions

This paper presents a formal framework, which is based on the notion of a serialization set, that enables to compose a set of consistency conditions into a more restrictive one. To exemplify the utility of this framework, a list of very basic consistency conditions is identified, and it is shown that various compositions of the basic conditions yield some of the most commonly used consistency conditions, such as sequential consistency, causal memory, and Pipelined RAM. The paper also lists several applications that can benefit from even weaker semantics than Pipelined RAM that can be expressed as a composition of a small subset of the basic conditions.  2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.