Implementing hybrid consistency with high-level synchronization operations

In recent years, there is a growing tendency to support high-level synchronization operations, such as read-modify-write, FIFO queues and stacks, as part of the programmer's shared memory model. This paper examines the problem of implementing hybrid consistency with high-level synchronization operations. It is shown that for any implementation of weak consistency, the time required to execute a read-modify-write, a dequeue or a pop operation is Omega(d), where d is the network delay. Following this, an efficient and simple algorithm for providing hybrid consistency that supports most types of high-level synchronization operations and weak read and weak write operations is presented. Weak read and weak write operations are executed instantaneously, while the time required to execute strong operations is O(d). This is within a constant factor of the lower bounds for most of the commonly used types of operations.